Bojack And His Wife

by ClarissaStories

Within the bright chaos known as Los Angeles, there are two that are destined to be together, knowing it in some lives within the layers where they're lucky enough to share with one another, and not in others. The most disorienting part: all of the complex experiences of that kind of transcending love all within one mind and body as it spills across the lives they share.

5. Chapter 5

You gave a small smile as you allowed one small peck, grazed by the edge of your teeth in a slight bite, to caress the side of his cheek. "Bad press is good press, right?"

Bojack let out something that was between a painful chuckle and a barley achieved hum of agreement. "One of putting it, I guess." His expression furrowed down in thought. "Not that I ever particularly wanted anything to do with press. Especially not in this scenario."

Your eyes turned in thought, cheek easing beside his shoulder as your body cradled beside his while you turned your thoughts over in consideration, arms cradling beside his hips.

"The truth of life and its lessons has come to me in small little narratives of processing now and then." Your face turned forward to his shoulder as your lips pressed on his clothes. "Small little trails of consideration now and then-none of them easy, and all of them leading into an extension and narrative of some madness at some point or another if I fed into the negativity too easily; but then I realized it was all the delicate matter or perspective, but the truth of things were regardless still true, and I would see it turning in front of my eyes even as I tried to deny it."

"Yeah?" Bojack's eyes turned to you in inquiry as he gazed at you with his eyebrows raised, his hand threading against the ticket as he handed it over to the ticketmaster. The ticketmaster turned his eyes over the piece of paper, then eased his eyes over between the two of you as you gave you both a quick raise of his lip and a nod, enlightenment in his eyes of welcome as he turned to the front of the smaller open door that led over to the area of the galactic space on the other side of the door. Bojack's hands threaded and eased against yours, in soft caresses of agreement between skin while his hands eased against your palm in small dances of agreement. "What was that?"

"For me, it was different than what someone like you would have, I imagine. But for me, it was about how I was one of the people in life who didn't matter-who had to learn how to live without love. And it's unfathomable, the amount of life and hardship and entire messiness of life that comes with gradually having to accept that. I've come to accept suffering as the default; there's nothing to be done about it, I've always thought; if there was something inherent in me that was unworthy, and the world was too superficial and cruel to care about it, then my only job then was to accept the inevitability of it. And the more I tried to fight it, the more truth kept coming to me anyway; and the more the negative thoughts and the abrasive hell continued."

Bojack's eyes darted down in thought as he threaded his hands beside the ticket, then spoke a low soft mutter to the ticketmaster beside him as he began to shoulder his way through the crowd along with you.

"And then what?"

"I don't know. Life just kept going, I kept being in pain-but I did learn that keeping myself comforted given my own personal situation, giving the scenario of my life and the emotional needs I had that were deprived, that it was my job to accept pain and suffering. It was my job to accept the lack of love and my small, worthless place in life and to try and carry myself through it every day, terrible as it was; to allow myself to be seen by my pain, if nothing else, to comfort myself in the emotional needs where they weren't met."

He snatched his hand against the side of the door, opening it up almost too briskly as he looked at you and indicated for you to go in while the ticketmaster stepped back, nodding curtly over to the rest of the crowd as they muttered in thanks while they walked their way inward. The narration of the lights and of the overhang of the voice boomed from the inside, trialing with an edge of welcome over to the other side of the door.

"And that helped you?"

"What helped me was learning that I was at the bottom in life-and therefore, it was m job to learn how to navigate with being at the bottom."

Bojack's ears splayed in thought, turning in a soft consideration. "And-now?"

Your eyes eased down in thought, hands trailing beside his arm lightly as you continued to shoulder your way through the crowd. "Lately, it's been feeling like the practice of remembering that constant strength and needing to carry myself-unseen, not understood, and even less known and the inherent strength it takes to carry that daily. The wisdom that I harbor has been able to make it all a little lighter than someone with less-and I know more than anyone that this world dosen't promise anything to anyone, and any blessing truly is that." Your eyes turned up as you met Bojack's considerate, concerned and vaguely bewildered ones. "But there's something strong and promised lately-a stimulation of something that's so rare that feels so incredible-it's terrible how rare it is, but it makes it all the richer."

The slightest and boyish smile twitched up on the edge of Bojack's lips at your confession, and his eyes trailed down in a soft thought for a moment at your words. Your hand eased beside his arm as you gave him a squeeze, and the dark and menadative moment that was part of the strength of building character was vaguely seen from Bojack for a moment where he understood how black it was for you that had made you who you were-and he felt all the more entwined and bonded towards you.

"No matter who anyone is, all problems come from lack of emotional connection and love." Your hands caressed down Bojack's arm, and he gave a soft breath as his eyes winced while he turned his eyes away in meldative thought. "Sometimes I wished I could have taken away my humanity and been as simple and undetached as dumb animal-to be saved from awareness of this weird need we have of hyper awareness of being connected-but I can't. I couldn't get rid of that narrative of how pathetic I was, how things I didn't have, of the tormented narrative in my own mind that cam with our natural trai to perceive life as a story, down to the nub. The truth of my lif and of how unloved I was and always would be swept through me every day, with nothing to be done about it, no change to be made. All I could do was somehow find peace with pain, which no one wants but people seem to think people do, and to let it accompany me-to do the impossible of finding comfort in the very thing destroying me. But it never got easier-your human needs not being met never gets easier. You just become more crazy, more lost, because you're still human, and you still need those things. But I couldn't die."

Bojack's eyes turned up to you in a light of thought, body shouldering through the people as they continued to ease forward through the door in the mode of their self indulgence. "No?"

"No. I was who I was, and I wanted to live as that person, no matter how unimpressive the world told me it was. Though it was all I craved, there was a mode of complete unknown vastness on the other side-something too exhausting to go to naturally. Though I had ever reason. I knew time would take me eventually. I just had to keep the void until then."

Bojack's body kept being rolled through and wrecked by the shoulders of the rich and the rest of the couples, well dressed and with large hats and with their voices trailing up. His air, stoic and handsome and conflicted with a hard wisdom, turned down in considerable thought. He gave a soft breath as he turned his head away from you.

"You know, I'm the kind of person who technically had a lot to lose in life. I had reasons to feel superior to others, riches, money, didn't need to worry about anything other than being alone and dealing with that. Being worried about people caring about me and being important. But-" He turned as he looked you over, worn expression and deepened wrinkles, lovable cheeks easing onto his face as his worn saddened expression looked you over. "But I don't know if there's such thing as being above a much as someone like me, or anyone, thinks. I don't think there's a direct answer for anyone, no matter what you do." He turned to you fully as the rest of the crowd was now disappearing entirely into the front of the archway, eyelids lowered into a humble sense of reflection that he was offering you in his tone of thought. "I actually think you were in a really admirable place."

"You do?"

"Yeah. No distraction from who you actually were-no bullshit other than the literal problem. Having to know yourself in the silence, having to face the truest and rawest form of yourself and pain without what my stupid brain does of drink and sex. I always knew the answers were in the silence, and I did it more than…Todd, for example. But I could never go beyond that. And it wasn't enough."

Your eyes trailed over Bojack, small smile curving on your lips-tentative, uncertain, welcoming.

"You're not the only one in pain. And-I'm not. And I think we can both share in that, at the very least. I've been in isolation and suffering in ways I can't even explain, and we can come together, even if I'm not that great, and there's more to settle for for the sake of turning away from suffering, at least for awhile. I'd like to be able to do that with you. I'm grateful for that. It gives me strength, to feel your pain. It feels like the most human thing I've ever felt in contrast to the world's disgust with its own reality. I'd like to be able to give that to you. The relief, not despite but because of the suffering, makes it feel like nothing else. And I'm not especially interested in worrying too much about being concerned with the world-they're just people, just as fogged up and muddled and flawed, and I don't think worrying about their opinion or being important is anything to be concerned with-or even should be."

The small, precious and tentative curve of his lip as it met his eyes; pure and at ease of gentleness, poking out from his eyes, even as he tried to keep it under.

"It feels good for me, too."

Your eyes lowered in soft flattering at his words, hands gripping your clothes.

"Excuse me!" The high pitch of the man guarding the door trailed his voice up, causing Bojack to wince as he treamored in himself as he snapped his head over to where the man who had opened the door-his mouth was wide opened, the white of the weasel with his body leanig beside the door, dressed uptight into his blue suit as he eased his body against it from where there were only a few small minute people making their way inside, taking and muttering to one another in their own candor of their amusement, hands trailed beside their arms as they swpt their way inside. "Everyone make sure you enter the building, please!"

Bojack's body cringed for a moment as his body jolted, and he turned his head over to where the weasel man was easing hi body beside the door, nodding his head as he cruelty turned and looked between the both of you in insistence, his head turning to the people passing by the wealer as they walked their way behind him. Bojakc collected himself as he closed his eyes and rpessed a had on the side of his snout, then indicated his head to the door.

"But not yet. You can tease me with whatever mysterious talk or life lessons you have going on when there isn't fifty skin vessels of invasive potential eyeballs on my every possible move."

You followed him inside as he eased his hand out to you gently, head ducked right with your michvelous nature that he found irreparably freeing and adorale at the same time.

All those thoughts, however, flew out his mind when he saw the suggestions of the slender neck, the sharp beak, and the narrowed and focused eyes as he walked his way inside with you.

The image of the preparator at the other end of the receptionist desk was surreal and just a minute triggering as Bojack had suspected when talking to her over the phone. Her neck was lean and graceful, just as her eyes were seductive-the hardened feeling in his legs increased, and he couldn't be bothered to feel shame for it, though the boner felt cheap compared to the past few weeks, and the senitment felt more like a punishment, rahter than something to be celebrated.

It wasn't that he didn't care about you, but he loved his own specific addictions and the way that he dealt with them far more than anything he could have experienced from the intimacy you had with each other-the indenible sense of how he found comfort in how he saw the world and himself. Love, as Bojack had come to learn, was not for him; he wasn't made for it, simple as the concept could come.

He took a breath as he adjusted the side of his slightly askew clothes, having been pulled down from your teasing of your hands and the painting of your talk and the consideration of your eyes, as well as the shvoing of the people who had forced their way past Bojack. He hoped his clear broken focus and increased shaky air wasn't as obvious as he felt it was as he made his way towards the side of the receptionist desk. He gave you a small, minute and timid smile as he gave you a small raise of his lip in an attempt to reassure you; though it was just as well for attempt of his own comfort. The swan woman turned her head up with a sense of grace and confidence that almost served to make Bojack feel ore guilty, somehow, as her neck curled around, eyes fliting and lowered in their packed blue eyeshadow as she lifted her lip in a grin.

"Hey. Horseman. Probably know me. And by probably, I mean I know you do."

The swan lifted her head up as she titled her beach, tinted with diamond and other signs to show she was higher up on the scale of status, took to looking him over. Her eyes were glistening in an almost michelous recognition as she fluttered her gaze between the two of you. Boajck felt himself wince; he hated her for that, just as he felt he hated her for everything he was comfortable in; even and especially it destroyed him, but the destruction was Bojakc's meaning, and Bojack was finding as he got older that even the terrible and the unfathomable was preferable in contrast to the wake of meaninglessness.

"You're right. I do. Asotunding."

He wiped the evidence off her face of her flirtatious nature with the instant mode of disapproval; instantly did her eyes narrow as she looked him over with something emptier and less heated with the life of knowing someone, and he saw her empty eyes in contrast to your compact ones almost instantly, ad it shocked him at the contrast. He enjoyed taking control, and for the first time since he had met you he felt he had at least a vague sense of it, though the way he wanted to do it consisted of heated, impulsive urges of physical distraction from the foreign feelings that plagued himself with you far too easily that he would have rather not considered.

"You're early," she commented, her voice lighter this time and less inviting towards whatever message she wanted Bojack to play along with. Her tone was light and casual-enough to the point that he could sense the poking of teasing that came with it.

"Are we? I'm pretty sure when you attend something this expensive, you can show up whenever you want."

"You got them for free, yes?"

"Same sentiment. I got them for free because I'm expensive."

She smiled knowingly as her narrows heated eyes looked Bojack over. "I guess the way you go about getting your way always works well enough."

He looked at her with a glare that spoke of a quick warning that edged his eyes. She was referring to how he had sold himself, sanity and dignity and otherwise, for a chance to cheapen himself; and now that you were physically here for her to make the mode of comparison, he could see the true immoral sense of the matter the swan woman was taking in now.

She returned Bojack's dryness with her own knowing gleam, a warning and a foretelling of what they would both do and plan to do, and he felt his stomach flip with both excitement and a certain shame at the reminder and sign of it. He wanted both confirmation that this would work and that she wasn't backing out without it being said out loud; and he knew he was disgusting at himself for even being so concerned about it, and she knew she was being difficult about it. In those narrow eyes she was giving him-the closest thing to a secretive confirmation she could manage-she turned her way back to the computer. There was a sickly reminder for Bojack of what it felt like to be doing only echos of that of which he had done before in the past twenty empty and sickly decades; and every time the routine was repeated, he felt himself sicker for it. And yet-it was him.

"Two tickets, strangers?" she inquired, tone both mocking and playful. He felt you shift beside him. He gave her a curt nod, reaching towards the money that sat on the front of his pocket on his shirt.

"Strangers, huh? Do you mean two tickets for this woman and I, and my imaginary friend by me that constitutes as the stranger? Because I know you know I know this woman. Or ae we playing mental chase for the next few hours?"

The woman gave him a slight edge and heated jolt of a narrow look; she had picked up on his warning fully. He slammed the cash onto the desk. It was a particularly big amount of cash; more than was needed or what they had agreed on, wordlessly or otherwise. The swan's lips curled into a smile as she fluttered her narrow eyes to it as Bojack tried to keep his triggered breathing to a minimum. Her narrow eyes turned back up to him as she reached her hand towards the cash and grazed her hand against it, then pulled it back to herself. She offered him a slight knowing smile that was just secretive as the messages they were transmitting between them. Bojack was aware of the delicaey of your body swaying beside him; and it was only serving to aggravate him more.

"For that price, I do," she said, turning her lip up into a smirk as her equally michcious eyes met on Bojack's wincing ones. "Seen you around a couple of times. You must got money, being up there on that large mansion and building up on those rocks away from everyone."

"I thought it was free." Your voice was softened with genuine bewilderment, your hand still staying and gripping his arm, and he almost wished it wasn't; the tender helplessness of how you were with him in front of the woman that saw Bojack for all the scum he was was almost too overwhelming for him to stand.

"News, magazines, billboards, the nonconsensual camps they have for taking literal binoculars and spaying on the uppers on the Hill. " He smiled cockly as he leaned against the counter, his body swaying in the wreckage of the chaos in the back of his head in guilt, offering the woman a smirk, attempting a cocky grin as much as he as able. "'Course you have."

"Course I have," she repeated. Her voice had a hint of a wall of separation in it, herself clearing her throat as she straightened her long neck and focused back on the computer. "Two tickets it is, then. Unless you want the 'side piece' discount."

Bojack's eyes widened as a dread came in his pupils, and he almost physically felt the sudden black tint of dread coming over him. He didn't turn to see if you had picked up on the meaning of the words; instead, he cleared his throat, leaning further against the edge of the counter while he managed a timid and terrified breath, threading his fingers against his wrists as he tried to recollected his sudden black drop of being revealed for the scum he felt he was. For the first time Bojack was capable in processing, he could sense what it meant to have something that was worthwhile and meaningful enough that he could feel the long processing of loss that would come after, rather than cheap replacement or empty indifference; he loathed the feeling more than the emptiness.

"Wouldn't be the first crazy thing that you've seen a bunch of nutcases around here say, would it? If someone where to come around here just for a cheap fix." Bojack chuckled with a rasped humor, though his eyes, flittered in question turned as he looked over to you to catch your emotion, even as nervous and devastated as he was in an odd way to see it. But your eyes were unreadable; edged on the sides with read, but unreliable.

"Hardly."

The swan seemed more abrupt and focused now as she started to work on the screen in front of her hands, causing the machine beside her to start with the buzzing against the edge of the machine. As the tickets printed, Boajck could feel your eyes burning into him.

"I'm the side piece?"

He smacked his lips together as another black wave overcame him that you had, in fact, understood and heard what the swan woman meant. He turned and he looked at you, timid panic flashed in his eyes.

"It's just a tactic to get us a better way in. Hollywood humor. Shitty, I know. "

You said nothing, and somehow that was worse than you playing along. He focused on the tapping of the swan's fingers against the keys to distract himself from that increased ringing again; the burning of the lust that edged his air as he watched her wings fly against her white feathered forearm wasn't doing his dry mouth syndrome any favors-nor the odd and twisted desire he had to use her a desire for an increased sense of relief from his incessant shame, rather than less. He felt the choas of his mind turning, his eyes lowering as teeth poked while he tried to reground the chaos of his thought.

In what seemed like slowed time did the ticket start to print, and the swam turned her eyes to it as she snatched it out of the machine. She handed it to Bojack, offering him a tight grin.

"Have a good time, kids."

"Kids, huh?"

Bojack snatched the ticket from her, not bothering to hide the vacant look of his eyes. As he took it from her, he was grateful for the sunglasses on his face that separated him from those eyes that were a little too sharp; he took them from where he had place dit onto his poked, teeth poked, and turned his eyes to the ticket as he winced and looked the information over."You're seeing a lot more than just celebrities in magazines if you consider this guy a kid. Have you seen my wrinkles?"

"She was teasing." Your voice was shy, and awkward, not unlike someone who was attempting to speak a language or a pattern they didn't understand.

He turned as he indicated his head to you. "She did say kids. You're the best contender for that."

'No, she was right." The swan woman's voice was edged as she spoke, and Bojack's eyes winded as he turned and met the hard look of her narrow eyes. "I was joking. I can see the old age on your face like anything."

Bojack's eyes emptied as he met her expression; she was challenging him, in an odd way. He cleared his throat as he closed his worn eyes and rolled his shoulders as he tried a reset away from the black panic and loathing of that of which haunted him.

"I'm going to stay here for a minute." Bojack turned his dry eyes back to you. "Got to make sure that I can keep all of our security stuff in check here. It's really boring shit. You don't want to stick around for it."

"Are you sure? I can wait." Your hand reached out for his back, and though there was an empty pain to the natural reaction he had and of the natural need to cheat himself from it, he wiggled himself away from you, though the emptiness in his eyes betrayed him.

"Don't wait. Go stare at starry things." He waved you away casually; or attempted to. "Just gotta catch up on some junk. I'll meet you in a second."

When you didn't move, he hesitated-the action that he did next was wrought of a deposition for you to merely listen. He leaned forward as he pressed his lips against the side of her forehead.

"Go on," he said, more gently now, voice rasped and almost a challenge of what was his dismissive voice before. "Everything's fine."

You hesitated, but after a moment did you separate yourself from him as you walked your way towards the entrance, the hallway large and leading towards the floor and over to the top of the ceiling through a several high feet marbled hallway,the height just as grandiose as its naturally tendency to make people feel small. Your head turned over your shoulder as you began to become engulfed into the black; your hair triling down your shoulders and the white of your dress causing you to look especially small and helpless. Bojack leaned his arm against the counter as he watched your back-not taking his eyes off of you until you were gone.

"Good. Emotional baggage gone." He turned snappily towards the swan. "Good emotional baggage, but that's why It's baggage. And it's done-" He gestured his arm in front of him in a moving motion, eyes lowered in dry emptiness. "So you can drop the back and forth act now."

The receptionist was the same swan who he had talked to over the phone and had made his deal with; he knew it for a fact now. Her eyes lifted up as she gazed at him with an inquiry that made him feel both challenged, caught, and turned on all at once.

Her eyes danced unimpressively between Bojack; the entirely of himself spoke of trouble, from the erratic splay of his mane where a few coarse hairs had come sticking out, to the dry lowering of his eyes, the sarcasm on his features, the puffy wear on his expression.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Bojack's eyes flashed at her, and the puffiness of the wrinkle of his eyes winced as he gave her a glare. "Oh, come on. You know-" Bojack raised up his arms on both sides as he indicted his arms beside him and gave a small sway of his body in an almost endearing mocking. "You coming back and forth and giving me mixed messages about how clearly pathetic you think this all is?"

"Partners?" she inquired. Her arm, attached to her long feathered wings that lied on the underside of them that pressed and grazed against the edge of the counter, swept across the keyboard as she gracefully pressed one slender finger against a key to either conform her emotional power over Bojack that she was sensing she had-or to make her simply confirm the fact that they were, all things considered, both on the same page.

Bojack's own puffed, pathetic and troubled wince only increased as he gazed at her pointedly. "Is it your job to ask about personal relationships?"

Her beak smirked up. "Just wondering how many tickets you need.'

Bojack rolled his eyes. The teasing glint in her eyes let him know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she knew what she was doing. His aggravation was making his already too tight clothes slightly hotter. The worst part was that it was working-he could feel his temptation to fall into the all too familiar meaninglessness of it all.

"Yeah, two and two." His eyes lowered, voice low, shamed and complacent. His hand found its way by his arm. "Please."

"One for the woman and one for you?"

"Obviously. Two and two. That's how numbers work."

It was one of very few times when he wanted the distraction to be as quick as possible-anything this day already felt uncertain, shaky, and black. He wanted what was presented in front of him to go as planned as much as possible-to have one thing that was in control, familiar, even in a terrible way. He wanted any action he fell into today to be as easily dismissed as much as anything else he had ever done; for it to be cheap, meaningless, and for it to hardly mattered what happened.

The swan raised a brow as he looked at him in question.

"You got a thing for putting on shades when doing cheap back and forth banter?"

The shades Bojack had taken he had placed on his dry and puffed eyes, and he had pulled them over his eyes by this point; hiding the shameful dry exhaust of his eyes as much as he could manage. "Sure, why not? We both know you're not doing this because you're attracted to me, so I'm not sure what the big deal is. We're bot hot and ready, and I don't see why we need to pretend that we're doing it for that thing people call romance. Even though this scenario is more like…moderately temperate. I'm not sure if anything here could be considered particularly hot."

"How does that denial feel?"

"You know what? Amazing. Thanks for your concern. You're great at making customers feel welcomed."

The swan rolled her eyes, though there was an extension of a new patience, and something even more hidden in her gleem of bittersweet complacency, as she did so. Her head titled forward as she turned her slightly fliraitous and amused smirk over to the side of where you had disappeared, her lowered and edged amused eyes turning over as she watched where you had walked your way into the official end of the exhibit.

"So it's drugs and some physical exchange we're doing here, huh?"

"Jesus-Yes." Bojack rolled his eyes, hands easing out beside him in a casual exasperation. "I think we both made that very clear."

The swan woman's eyes paused as she looked Bojack over, and then her amusement turned further into a hidden understanding in her sharp eyes as her long neck turned back to the computer, tapping for a moment as she looked the screen over.

"That woman knows how to drag in a crowd, weather she means to or not. And I don't know how to be able to explain it, but she seems to be bringing out a certain air to you-everything has it's own emotions version of things, and for the frist time, from what I've heard and the time I spoke to you, you seem to have something more clear about you. Peaceful." Her eyes lowered as she looked over Bojack sharply. "It's nice."

"Yeah, ok-look. Are we doing this thing or not?" Bojack's hooded eyes gazed at her with exasperation as he leaned his elbow beside the counter. "And what do you mean by she draws in a crowd? The only reason why people are here is to see the lights. You do know that, right?"

"I don't doubt that. But I heard a lot of rumors-people saying there's this cute little theme going around, a small little trickle of curiosity and joy, as it is with anyone, that's been going around and tap dancing against itself of people saying they should follow a little blonde woman like that. Said something is pure about it."

Bojack raised a brow at the woman respectively as he looked her over.

"And you honestly think a bunch of reasonable rich people who didn't get that way from being poetic and emotional believes that?"

"That's some of the context of conversation I heard just now when people were walking in, yes." She shrugged her white shoulders. "Granted, I never thought that people would actually ascribe it to the woman that you have beside you officially. But I did notice that she has the look-something in her eyes."

"Her eyes." Bojack gazed at the swan pointedly, body swaying in question."You're judging her by her eyes?"

"I felt something for a vague bit when you two walked in. Of course I just assume it's my brain attempting to latch onto anything fun and it's just from brain tricking me, but-" She shrugged, her eyes narrowed as she contiend to tap on the keyboard. "I wouldn't put it past the mode of truth, with everything I've seen and heard these days. I wish I could tell you to not do this, frankly."

Bojack chuckled, in a nerved and invalidating fashion. "What are you, entirely understanding of the world and how certain people think?"

"I'm only saying that that woman has a factor that models what everyone has been talking about lately." The swan woman's eyes turned down sharply as her expression turned to where you had disappeared for the time being; though Bojack could still see a trail of your dress as you sat down beside the wall a little bit away from the entrance of the museum of where you had just gone in. Though you weren't looking over your shoulder to see if Bojack was coming after you, he could see that you had settled beside a chair behind the archway, the rags trailing in front of you, waving a pale hand over to the people who were passing by you now and then when Bojack saw through the window the men and woman turning down and looking at you in inquiry.

"What have they been saying?" Bojack's eyes finished narrowing as he watched you cautiously, then turned his eyes up in question as he met the swan woman and her content narrowed eyes. Her lip raised up at the tentative question.

"Lot of stories," she responded, simply, tapping her fingertips beside the keyboard. Bojack's expression furrowed as he turned his eyes down in concerned thought. She gave Bojack a slight curt nod of her head as she met the concern of Bojack's considerably concerned expression. "Do you want to go in or do you want to do this pow-wow right now?"

Bojack's eyes dimmed in exhaust as he met her eyes, but he rolled his shoulders, giving a small curt nod as his ears lowered, looking down in an aimless acceptance while he managed a curt nod.

"Yeah." The purity and the emotionally intelligence that Bojack harbored caused that oddly handsome grace he held to meet his expression as he curved his lip into a small smile. "Let's try it."

The swann leaned forward and pressed the side of his shoulder beside her cheek, in a flirtatious fashion, a smile tugging on her beak now that caused Bojack to still feel relentlessly uncomfortable, and even more than that, guilty, but he didn't pull away entirely as he watched her body leaned forward, breasts easing in front of the counter.

"So you were serious about wanting to try this. Didn't want to back down."

"Bingo. At least that's one thing you were buying."

He had started to develop a habit of purposely keeping the sunglasses on his face to keep a dulled protection between him and the rest of the world-especially in the wake of the shock of guilt he was willingly turning himself into now. It separated him from everything else-there was a black tint between him and everything else, and that was good enough for him. Someone as sick as Bojack needed to be sure that he kept himself as he navigated life in almost a handicapped fashion; if he were to see and to feel things as deeply and himself as they were, he would be destroyed with the layers of emotional shame that came along with it.

His eyes flickered as he spoke the words, feeling as if she could practically see through whatever little genuine self-respect that he was taking out of himself with some unwitting invisible hand; and his worse nightmare; you yourself. He tried his best to pull himself together, knowing that at the very least he had to convince himself that he could keep himself put together somewhat. He had learned, if nothing else, through the way the cracks of his life had fallen apart that some of the only ways he could survive it was to convince himself that he was in control-even if he felt like he was anything but.

She was still staring, her carved eyes lowered down in question, eyes flirting. It was making him increasingly more aggravated-he felt a heat tinling against the edge of his neck where his brawny skin met his sweater while fingertips pulled at the edge.

"What, star struck?" he jabbed. "If you want a photograph, do it after the reason we came here. Otherwise, it's incredibly embarrassing for the company that a big star showed up to. Even worse, showed up somewhere to a company that advertises something that isn't worth it anyway, consisting of employees that spend more time invading important people's lives than they do their jobs."

He took a breath, his hands hitting with a slam somewhat onto the counter. The swam woman took to a chuckle as she eased her elbow back from the counter, surprise darting across her expression; and then a small heat of confidence as she turned her eyes while her slitted eyes met Bojack's, and she reached out a hand and squeezed the edge of his arm; it did little to calm him, and it almost seemed like a silent confirmation that he was right to try and protect whatever little company he was able to gather in what was an otherwise wrecked and uncertain storm of his life, uprooted into chaos of what it had become-even if it meant hurting you, and even if that company was the extension of chaos and uncertainty, which was the only kind of company Bojack had come to understand.

"Relax." The swan's hand readjusted against Bojack's arm as her eyes lowered into a further flirtation against his own, though there was a slight edge of challenge to her eyes this time; she could tell Bojack wanted to wretch himself away. His ears lowered as his twisted expression turned and met her eyes as he snatched himself away from her touch, his other hand coming to graze beside his hand in his awkward fashion.

"I am relaxing. Or I would be, if I got a ticket to the event I paid for- and if I got a drink of fresh water with lime. You owe it to me after this. "

"I'll get you your ticket." Her eyes narrowed as the light of the screen reflected against her vision. "Not sure about the prime princess request."

"It's not a princess request. It's a well deserved and wise decision to give someone who could toss this place up for everything its worth."

The swan's eyes flicked away from the screen as she looked him over. "You ok?"

His lips lifted into a dark smile."Oh, yeah. I'm so great."

"If you need to step outside-"

He waved his hand. "No need for that. At all. I promise i'm fine. I'm just-" A quick shrug. "-Aggravated, is all. Very much."

His fingers nervously scratched the edge of his cheek. He tried to ignore that consistent feeling of sweating, hot feeling of aggravation that was bringing a wave of heat to his own son; the chaos of his mind.

"Everything leads back to people trying to fight the emptiness of existence."

"Goog God. Well, yes, obviously."

The swan chuckled as she turned her narrow eyes back to the screen, clicking beside it as she did so. Her eyes narrowed as she darted her expression over Bojack, who's eyes lowered down as he kept his hand by his chest. "Seems like some of us have a more chaotic way of going about it more than others. What's important is that you at least have a sense of clarity of who you are and what you do, no matter the flaws. The biggest suffering is someone who can't even remember what they are or why they are-we have a small film of something that turns us into an insight inside of ourselves that is the only thing that makes us feel human." The swan woman turned her head over to where you were sitting by the archway. "Seems like your side piece you brought in has that figured out."

Bojack's eyes lowered. "How do you know?"

The swan shrugged, her narrow eyes darted back to the screen. "It's in her air. How she carries herself, is all. You would do well to try and follow it."

Bojack's wet eyes turned as he watched where he could see how you were leaning back beside the well, his fingertips easing beside his wrist. He closed his eyes as he gave a soft breath, turning his eyes back to the woman.

"Yeah, ok. Just give me the ticket and let's try to hash this out, please. We both know what existence is like, the actual emptiness of it. No need to make it a whole thing."

Despite his best efforts to stay focused and in control with the swan woman, he kept turning his eyes over to where he could catch your dress and rags. You were being patient with him, despite his increased sense of that fight of refusal to be anything but easy to swallow.

Somehow, his trust for you wasn't deepening. Though there had been a gentle grace that had traced what you had given each other that morning, complete through soft sheets and his clumsy touches and cornily executed jokes of talking penieses enterning gasping vaginas, cartoon voices that he dorkily spoke that caused your lips to raise into a smile while your legs wrapped around his stocky ones, heated kisses pressed against you through raspy morning voices, there had been something about it that morning that had made it hard for him too look at you once reality had settled back in. He felt as if the love you shared with one another, or the relief it was giving him, whatever it was, was something of such a delicate practice towards such an unworthy life that if Bojakc were to do one thing wrong, it would lead to a black despair rich and specific enough that it was only relevant to himself-and it was terrifying, and the relief he got from that delicate meditative rhythm with you was all that felt true or good; and it was all horrifying.

Somehow, the sweeter you became, the more he became uncomfortable in his own specific life, made even more conflicted by the red and broken patterns of his mind that was almost always tormented and guilt ridden. Times with you, mixed in with the incomprehensible mixed storms he felt about himself, seemed as if they were both calmed and triggered by you all at once, and they came and went like exhausting waves as he tried to understand your unconditional fondness towards him that he quite literally didn't know how to respond to.

This morning, in particular, he had felt like he was too much away from himself-or the version of himself he had wanted to be; the one he felt he should have been. Though you had accepted every version of him, that had somehow only declared him into the idea even further that the only way he could be worthy of you was by becoming anything other than who he naturally was-in this case, plain and simple and by literal decision-being a drug addict.

He snapped his fingers against the swan, who's eyes were squinting in her focus. She lifted her eyes up impatiently, eyes narrowing into a frown.

"Hey, hurry it up? Some of us have more important and interesting lives than sitting behind a desk all day."

Something inside of her eyes darkened as she snapped her expression over Bojack's now leaning and still exasperated expression. Bojack was trying to keep himself more logical than emotional, something he knew was going to throttle him if he couldn't find the balance; and something he had failed at before.

"Keep this up and I'll be sure that you'll get just as much trouble being here as much as any review you could give us." She leaned forward on the counter until her face was only mere inches from his. "You're not the only one with power here, big guy."

He met her energy as he leaned forward on the counter with a bitter smirk. "Aren't I?"

He couldn't tell if she was enjoying the superficial interaction or was disgusted by it; but with a statement of confidence she spoke; "Keep trying your luck and you'll see."

"That's obviously a challenge." He adjusted until both of his hands were pressed against the counter, meeting eye level with the swan, his own invitation for her to take them. But her narrow eyes only eased down for the moment, and Bojack had to try and recenter himself to try and remind himself that his emotions of loathing and wretched insecurity and that maddened and curving sense of black loathing and pain was only a feeling; a rocking force form how strong it was, and the ways of which he had felt it before was only increasing as he got older, rather than easier; pain never got easier, not with his relationship with himself or with anyone else or pain as a collective whole; but he could at least try to control it for once, rather than being timid and pathetic and wrecking and rolling around it as he always did. "And I'm obviouslynot falling for being intimidated by it."

Her eyes glinted in a dark challenge that, admittley, made him hard between his legs-anger, both at himself at the situation, followed the action, and somehow that caused to make it more intense.

"We'll see."

"We will." He leaned forward a few inches further. "Especially once you give me that ticket so we can get this thing ont."

Instead of being the kind of man that was caught between happiness and misery, he had, lately, instead chosen to refuse to reflect on anything he had been feeling at all; excessive overeating from the morning was currently jamming his stomach, and his body was as uncomfortable as much as the relentless sickness and turning of narratives in his mind meant to torment him specifically was every moment of the day-and this afternoon, both elements of all of his disposition working together. Giving himself not much time to reflect on the decision he was making was the only thing getting him through the hours so far-or what it meant for the long run, especially. He hoped that it meant nothing at all. That it would just be another morning, another lay, another bad date, another drug smuggle. You would go home and he would call you up a few days later in a drunken haze and he would smash again. In a few more months, he would do the same thing with another aimless drug eyed woman, falling into the same usual patterns of toxic comfort he always had. That was the best , most comforting and consistent narrative he knew, and that was the reason he chose it time and time again.

Bojack felt his eyes watching you as you made your way around the large marbled corner, keeping his eyes on you until you disappeared behind the wall entirely this time. He was out of your sight, for now; his true self covered behind a cheap marble wall. He felt sickening relief at that, and enjoyed it too much to reflect or to allow guilt to follow the feeling.

It would have been just as easy for you to turn your head around the corner to watch him, but he didn't allow himself to think about that too much. You weren't the suspicious type, for the most part. The questioning you had laid in him that morning had worn in him and annoyed him to degrees he had hoped wouldn't happen with you from his end-but he didn't allow himself to act on it. He had learned the hard way what expressing his annoyance with others got him when it was on impulse, but there was more to his extra layer of rare patience than just that, especially when it came to you and whatever rare delicate joy of humanity you were giving him. He felt as if he were on the verge of death, and he had felt his intense emotional depression and odd dispiar before-but every time felt as if it were the time when he could go over to whatever was on the other side of life, and everytime did it feel just as surreal and terrifying, and every time just as likely to happen if nothing new come to take him away from that black of which he had been prociasting for so long-that he always did.

He genuinely liked you, as much as he could with a wrecked and tormented inner life, and he felt a black shakiness at the thought of you being gone. He felt like inwardly punishing himself for that alone.

"So, this drug, it's happening this century, right?" There was a lusty, teasing pickup to the statement, as he turned his eyes, tinted with that purity only when concerning someone he had that pure caring for, over to the swan while he took back that empty jaded scowl.

His slitted eyes raised in warning. "Thought you would never ask."

"Just did. And thank god. Now we can both get the trouble over with."

He gave a deep breath and he saw the swirling of the galaxy of the exhibit tracing against the edge of the measoum walls of where you had disappeared. He could distinctly hear the overtone of the voice that was coming from inside the speaker of the narrator of the exhibit. The projected stars continued to dance in front of his eyes.

"BJ-right here, big guy."

He turned his head sharply over towards the storm that was now the expression of the swan woman, who had transformed from the professional look that she had been masking a moment before and was now replaced by a teasing and lust filled smirk, the tightness of her work dress falling from the strap and down her arm. All politeness and decency was completely gone from her expression now. The way she seemed to feel about Bojack, full of a certain kind of judgment and distance, began to paint her narrow and feathered features instead.

"You're here in private, correct? As in, no other attached visitors are coming in?"

"What? Yes. Of course I am. I couldn't make that any more clea-" He took a breath, his fingertips easing against his mane as he turned his eyes up in thought. "Yes, I'm here in private. Except for the side piece, and the weird rich people who are watching our every move, and any potential camera guy. But other than that-totally on the low."

When she stared at him, he sighed as he leaned further towards her, elbow gliding against it. "Look, point is, no one here knows why I'm here. My 'side piece' who just left might suspect something over on the other side. But she's not connected to anything. But, regardless, keep this all on the down low. Both for your…sitting job, and for everything that I am and do."

"So you're not telling anybody about your little relapse? Trying to dress up as some sort of cute romantic date that you can take someone on so that you can be showered with her affections and get all of your extra little blow while you're at it? Helps keep the thought off of what you're doing?"

"Christ- What is with you?" He pressed a hand against his sunglasses to pull the item up a few inches to peek at her through raw eyes; as much as he didn't want to see the raw core of what he was doing, he knew he needed to. The haunted and heavy empty days of the ghost of attachment to a person he was emotionally connected to that was gone was a countless form of human emotional tragedy that he could have handled with a lesser connection-but not with you, and he wouldn't let the easily predictable swan woman be what brought him back down into a grimy reality if he screw this up today, instead of the odd foggy disposition of purpose he felt with you. "We are both getting something out of this, right? We're on the same page here."

"Of course. I do a little bit of dirt for you, you do it for me. I just didn't think you would drag along some women with the show. Seems pretty callus, even for our types."

"I'm not dragging her along-she asked to come. She insisted. She likes being her."

The swan stared, challenge in her eyes. Bojack felt hi frustration reset as he met her eyes, his own impossibly puffed and exhausted ones flaring.

"Are you seriously going to interrogate me into a corner when this could be uneventful and a simple thing for both of us?"

"I think she deserves someone to ask about what she's getting herself into. We both know you won't put her into a good quality scenario." Her narrow eyes turned as she looked to the space where you had walked in. "Poor thing, at the whims of anyone who takes her in-good moral character or not."

He felt a black surge come over his chest again; there was a part of him that was losing even when it came to convincing himself. He had, in truth, dragged you along into his mess; he should have been more convincing to get you to leave. But something had stayed his tounge, and the truth was he hadn't wanted you to go.

"Hey, I'm a big, weak, baby, ok? A giant asshole. That's all the explanation and answer you need. Isn't that enough for an explanation?"

"Admitting it won't make it any better."

"Well, swan feathers, I'm not trying to make anything 'better'. There's no such thing, and I get that. I'm trying to get us to move onto the next step of the protocol that we both agreed on a long time before a typical set up of a hookup came along. If this is all it takes to throw you off, you might want to think about getting tangled in business that doesn't involve big name celebrities that do shit like this all the time and don't want to turn it into a weird therapy talk-and that includes commenting on the side piece."

"I"m only saying that she seems like someone who is especially wise. Gentle. Pure. You want to take her into this mess, make her apart of it? And after everything she's been through, is going through?"

"Well-"

Bojack's hand placed on his palm, ears lowered. He knew that he didn't have an excuse, but that only served to make him more angry and cocky in speech. It was a comfortable defense; acting out had never failed at making him feel better before.

Still, he couldn't deny he felt something torn out of him as he looked up at the fluttering lashes of her narrow eyes that gazed back and forth between his conflicted ones He tried to ignore that bleeding sense of black guilted humor that would have been easier to live with rather than without-the alternative was reflection and deep and complex war, and he knew he didn't want that.

The galactic reflection of the lights turned to the bottom of the floor. His eyes turned to it.

"Is that light spilling out of the damn hallway? I swear it's getting bigger. And they call me a narcissistic centered asshole. Look at that shit. Practically waving the white and purple around to get whatever attention they can gather."

The swan woman was leaning further against the counter until her breasts were only a few inches from the curve of his hands that were rested on the counter, the pink fabric of her blouse dressing beside his hand. He felt her baited breath of the heat that left her mouth as it grazed against his skin; he felt that shiver of delicate heated lust come over him again, disgusted at its core as it was, it saved him from that bittersweet edge of something incomprehensible and terrifying for him; and he admired that. He let out a raspy murmur that was somewhere between a desperate neigh and a gentle feelings of that of which possessed him from all sides as he eased his hands further to the woman's breasts, eyes winced as he looked her over.

"For a pain in the ass, you know how to keep something interesting. How to keep it-" He took in a breath as he felt his body jolt with desire. His next word sounded more like a comical attempt at being charming and savvy than a word of barely suppressed desire a she spoke the word; "Alluring."

"You don't want me," she murmured against his ear. Her beck leeaned further against his cheek, and he felt his skin raising into bumps at touch while the side of her body eased beside his. " You don't want anyone. Just distractions."

He could feel his panic in his chest increase as he tried to concentrate on this simple task in front of him of getting what he needed from the woman. With the complicated conflict dressing him now, it seemed impossible, but he knew he had to at least try at this point in the manner. If anything was greater than his guit, it was certainly that sense of that unforgiving desperation of needing more-of anything that he could get.

He scratched his hand against the marked side of his cheek, the aggravated wounds permanent as they spoke if his nervous tactic to dispel his anxiety right along with playing with his hands, to rest that nervousness and disoriented lack of grounding as his eyes kept trialing towards the edge of the galactic space that still teased against the walls. Nothing took away the itch once the panic started-or the ringing in his ears.

"What are you thinking about? This remind you of anything? Something troubling you?"

Her beak was now grazing against his skin, and he felt his sex addiction preventing him from being able to respond properly as his mind settled for a barely grounded chaotic erratic energy of desire; as naturally intelligent and clear headed as Bojack was, the chaos was only something from a conflicted inside of a life.

"Damn you." His voice reached a new tremble of a ras as he felt her lips raising up beside him. "Using your-" he took another breath if barely suppressed want -"Way of knowing I can't say no."

"I do know an easy target when I see one, yes. You all make yourselves relentlessly easy to find."

You do know I've spent my entire life having to accept that there was something innately unlovable and wrong about me? I just keep learning the lesson over and over-because there's nothing else to do except to go in circles where you were get your hopes up and then remember over and over again that there's a reason why no one has ever loved you. That no one can." He gave a pathetic slight mumble as he turned his head over to where he had seen you disappear; your presence in his life, much like it was to do with anything of the soul, was fleeting and delicate, and he felt himself falling into black far too quickly when you were gone. "But when I have her company, suddenly, it all makes sense, in a way. And I'm scard of that So-" His eyes turned down thoughtfully, at juxtaposition with his hand as it grazed beside the swan woman's hip. "This is better."

"Lack of control. Not uncommon in these parts of businesses."

He let out a deep breath as he felt a surging hatred go through him, weakened with self loathing and discomfort. She was right, and he knew it. This had been the countless times he had allowed his comfortability with his toxicity to take him over; and not the first time or the last he had refused to feel sorry for it.

"Do you try to make your business about things that don't really have anything to do with you all the time? Just take the cash, give me my shit, I give you yours, and we can both move on with our lives. It doesn't even matter. Case closed."

" You don't even feel just a little bit bad?" Her other hand began to lean backward into the cashier. Her intimacy stayed by him, but her hand snatched out to the wad of cash that she pressed her slender fingers around. Bojack watched it with an increased sense of increased, ringing panic. "You did pay a lot. Clearly not only do you know what you're doing, but you're also killing yourself over it."

"All the time, every day." The muscles on his face tensed as he watched her take the cash to her chest, threading one fingertip on the dollar bill as she gazed at him with that ease of heated discomfort. "Not exactly something that's new news, and I don't know why we have to talk about it like it's some sort of remarkable thing that's going to led me to some sort of cliche path of redemption, or whatever kind of made up concept that doesn't actually exists that that makes bad news feel better about themselves. It's not really any of your business- even though I know that everyone and everyone within everyone in this city thinks everything is their business all the time."

" Just wanted to know."

"Do you? Is that really the only reason? Or are you trying to stick your fingers into my secrets?"

"Because even the worst ones I've ever had eventually told somebody so that they could get help for it."

His eyes flickered at that.. "Are you serious?"

"Yoru reaction is all I need to know that you want help."

"No, no. Not that." He waved his hand dismissively and impatiently. "Who gives a shit about that?"

"You do."

His eyes lowered. "I do not."

The swan indicated to where you had disappeared.

"She does, then, and by default you do. She has that chemistry that speaks that she can give you that spark a little bit. I see it in the ay you light up. We naturally light up in things that are good for us, no matter how little hope we have; that's why they're called good things."

"What? No, she just-" Bojack's pure and tentative eyes turned back to where you were. His eyes bulged further for a moment in troubled thought. "She needs a place to stay, is all. She has no standard. You should see the douchebags she put up with before." His aged eyes lowered down. "And will after."

The swan's eyes curled as she fluttered over Bojack's expression for a moment.

"You don't strike me as the kind of man to care about the nothing or the niche of the world. It takes too much out of you; there's too much punishment in it. You focus on the people that are meant for you to leverage you higher or to give you something so you don't have to be dragged down into the hell along with people like that."

Bojack's expression pouted as his conflicted eyes lifted up to the swan. The muscles on his face scrunched in a glare.

"Why do you think you know what I would and wouldn't do?"

"Because I know human nature. And I've seen the way it's displayed from your end."

Her narrow eyes fluttered down, and there was an authentic sense of heaviness to what she spoke. Bojack felt his expression fall as he took in her heaviness. He paused as his empty eyes turned down, gave a breath, and then readjusted to meet her eyes, which turned back up to meet his when she felt his readjustment.

"What are the chances that I'll stand out doing this exchange for the drugs?"

Her head tilted to the side. "What do you mean?"

"I mean-I'm not the only one who's done this here? Recently, I mean. Obviously there's been a whole clash of history of you doing this at various locations at some point, I'm sure."

"Why is the history any of your business?"

"Because-" Bojack's eyes widened in panicked thought, and he gave a slight shrug to try and dissipate tension."It would be good to know so that I had someone to pick up and talk to the next time I want another helping of the crack instead of someone boozo that I have questions about with this kind of thing. Better that than having to deal with it with all the gumbled garbage I had to shift through this time. So-" His bottom eyelids winced upward, nervous smile on his expression as he gazed at her with that nervous and timid expression "- I'd like to be able to make sure that this transaction goes as smoothly as possible, both for yourself and for me, so that in the future you can have, and I'd like to add onto this to help you realize that this is a good idea, a even and decently rich customer that you can rely on for your business and for me, someone I can smoothly rely on for blow in the future. We both understand? It's a win and a win, I don't see what could ever be wrong about taking this the smooth way so I can keep having the crack. "

"I giving you enough that it should keep you satisfed for longer than any need you'll have of wanting to reach out to me about it if you take it on average. Even with your body type, it should take a good few months, unless you're planning on overdosing."

"Hey, I asked a question. And I know that look of vague disapproval that's supposed to make me feel bad because there's some moral sense that I'm supposed to care what you think. Well, news flash, feathers, I don't. If I did, I would've respected you enough to not drag you into this. Either answer or turn this conversation around back to me and my problems and then we'll both really be getting nowhere."

"Typical turn back around. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, considering the context of how we both ended up here."

"What, with you procrastinating on what you promised? Or the part where I talk to you the way you backtrack on everything I asked with a bunch of undeserved and prodding teasing?"

A sly, quick smile traced itself on her beak-it almost made him feel sick with the way that it greeted him with a sly stability that seemed unwavering to his own jabs. "Deflecting on it. Exactly my point."

"Deflecting on a pointless conversation, maybe."

He took a sharp breath as he turned his head down towards the counter for a tense moment, tapping his fingers against the surface. He was trying to keep that illusion of strong and confident, but it was already beginning to leave him, with very little, if any, of being the confident narrative he wanted to dress up.

"This is bullshit."

"I'm telling you now that putting on the amount of anger and impatience you are is only going to make this process the exact thing you're saying you don't want it to be."

Bojack's eyes bulged as he snapped his head around the area-for the most part, his guilty eyes landed on nothing. "I need a cigarette. Or anything to get me through this nightmare called stringing me along." His puffy, worried eyes narrowed as his expression traced the edge of the counter while he took it in in his foggy troublement, tapping his fingertip incessantly against it for a moment, the nervous energy giving him something to focus on as he pressured his hand against it. He gave an awkward breath as he snapped his hands to the pocket beside him and frantically felt for another cigarette; when his hands felt nothing but emptiness, he gave a slight swear as aggravation flew in his eyes. Finally did he readjust his misaligned hair with a frantic sweeping of his palm as he patted his hands against the counter in his nervous desperation.

"Whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm just going to do enough to get rid of the edge, and then I'll worry about the next time."

"There shouldn't be a next time."

"Are you playing the role of a mother I didn't have? You've already shown more concern about my wellbeing in the past ten minutes than anyone has in my life. Honestly, it's almost creepy."

"Mainly no longer interested in serving 'stars like you'. I have clients with just as much money, and only half of the delusional attitude." Her narrow eyes flicked up in challenge as her breasts continued to graze beside his hand; despite the fact that she was leaving Bojack in a mode of suspense, it was clear that her teasing was only leading further to where she was ultimately planning on taking him; and all the heat and lust in her eyes was inviting to Bojack as something of a practice he had done more times than he could ever bother or want to remember, but he was aware of the fact that it was an old practice that had long since lost its zest, and even with just a little rest away from it and returning was the zest of the meaninglessness of jamming his mind and body into her just as unsatisfying and empty as much as it had been last time; the zest not so much rejuvenated as much as it was only an exhausted revisit, as empty and tired as his life.

"'Stars like me' know the first thing about how to haggle a bitchy ''employee like you'." His puffy eyes winced in aggression as he leaned his arm froward. "While you sit here and try to sell a lot of seedy desperate people a bunch of blow, I get the repetitive joy of getting a paycheck every time you decide to consume something I made in a few months." He allowed his face to place inches away from hers, his hands curled into her and drenched over with a slim extent of sweat; he was timid and helpless, even when he was full of defense. "I'm above you for a reason. So you might want to think about serving that blow."

Her eyes narrowed in a seductive satisfaction that he hated as he took it in; and not entirely because he knew that he would take anything she gave him, if only to appease the over complication that was inspired from you. Her narrow eyes eased against Bojack's hand as a small smirked curved up on her lip.

"You think you're above me."

"Well, I am the one that's using his money he dosen't even have to earn and throwing it at you with something that could get you arrested because this is just a point of pleasure for me rather than breaking a law, but-yes."

"But you're here begging for blow. From me."

Bojck's eyes narrowed as he looked into her, feeling his lack of control of being able to find any relief from the natural strain he felt inside of himself decreasing.

"Hey, positions like you aren't exactly known for being in the parts of the city where they can even conceive of preaching to people like me anyway. It's only because of people like me that you're able to get a side hustle in the first place."

The swan's woman's eyes turned down in quick thought as she kept her slender white hands by his fingers. "Fair."

"So are you trying to tell me what I should and shouldn't do? How does that even make sense? "

She paused, breathed in, and then twisted her head backward, length of her beck twisting as she eased her body back with a moment of heavy thought, her eyes rolling back as she thought Bojack's words over. There seemed to be something heavier she waa cradling in her consideration of Bojack's words; s if there were a tide of some heavier truth that was surrounding her, everything else an island, if even that.

"You're right, big man." She gave him a soft and lazy shrug from her white shoulders, fluttering her eyes at him with a downright causality as her beak leaned against her hand that she took from his palm to cradle her cheek, continuing to give him a lazy smirk that traced her beak that seemed as if she was trying to keep the secret from him as much as she was able through heated and now lazily emotionally drunken eyes. She managed a small shrug."I guess we're both the bad guys in the situation that's dressed in hypocrisy, right?"

"Hey-I'm not a hypocrite. We both had clear communication of how we would go about and exchange this."

In the midst of his frustration he spoke the words too loudly, and his ears lowered while his eyes widened as he heard the way the words echoed around the space. He looked over his shoulder-there were only about one or two other people that were rich enough that they would have been able to attend the event, and therefore anyone he was concerned about was lost in a golden tinted cloud of their own rich melody of cantonment. A mole man with her spectacles eased on his squinted eyes was talking with his companion, both of them dressed tight in their suits, their words low and soft as they spoke with their low mumbled rasps and chuckles. But his heart still pounded, and he lowered his voice and shrunk into himself as he leaned against the counter, this time keeping his rasp to a low mumble as he placed one hand beside his expression.

"Can we just get this over with? And hey, you don't have any kind of chewing things or any kind of candies, right? When we're done with this, uh, exchange thing-, I'm still going to need something to keep my mouth busy. It's that bad."

'You're not planning on taking the crack as soon we we're done, are you?"

"What?" Bojack's eyes flared. "No. And this isn't exactly the best place for me to break with that shit anyway. It's kind of a place that I'm purposely taking this…woman out for the sake of trying to convince her that I'm halfway decent, even though I'm pretty sure all those signs are thrown out the window the second she met me. She seems to have a little-" He clicked his tongue. "Cotton in her brain. From all the life that she's lived. I want to help her-I don't know why. I just feel like it would be rewarding."

"If you want to be halfway decent, I would suggest making a long way out the side of the exit that makes you everything that you currently are, and once you take the long and winding road out that way, transform into something else entirely."

"Oh my God, you're really on my case, aren't you? What are you going to do for your next trick? Are you going to start telling me about the next reason why I should get therapy? Doesn't work on me, by the way. I'm too busy already knowing everything that's wrong with me and not worrying about pretending like I can fix it because of some strung together words that some college degree several years younger than me adult uses to diagnose with me a label that won't change anything."

"Bo-"

"Or refuses to see the endless amounts of small little constant ongoing issues and suffering of the world that no one ever acknowledges because people know there's nothing they can do about it." His eyes flared in a fire as he met her eyes with a new sense of energy of fight. "It's not as if you can do anything about pain anyway; no matter who you are or what happens, it's waiting on the other side, because that's what life is. And I made up my mind about that a long time ago. So you can sit here and try to preach to me about something for whatever reason that you want, or maybe you'll take the approach of the reason why this imploded in front of me in ways that are totally out of my control-" He lifted his hand up in a gesture, something in his voice changing to something more somber that spoke of something more and reflecive than just erratic anger- "As far as I can tell, and made more aggravated just by the fact that everyone's always telling me that I can change it. Are you going to be another perceptively washed up moron going to tell me that I should just give up on everything I've used to cope and magically turn myself around, like a goddamn hokey pokey dance, and completely rewire my brain? Even when it's been made abundantly clear that I tried, and can't?"

"Where did that monologue come from, the part of your despair that you're clearly always thinking of, or the part where you just start spewing self loathing?"

Boajck was trying to keep his breathing to a minimum-it became heavy when he worked up. "Can you just lay off and just give me the goddamn blow already?"

Sh rolled the length of her neck, turning it backward for a moment, her head turned to the side for a moment as her eyes seemed to go somewhere else with that same other layer of some knowledge that she held. She released a drawn out sigh from the side of her beak as she finished turning and gaing at the wall, some narrative inside of her so deep that it seemed to be taking her somehwere rich and detached.

"Allright, you got me." The swan rolled her eyes up sharply as if on reset, giving a vague shrug. "Let's move on."

Bojack kept his ears lowered as he counted to keep his hardened glare on his face, still breathing with a labored heaviness.

"'Bout time." His voice was more somber and mature now, and his body leaned back a few inches from leaning on the counter as dry eyes looked her over. "I shouldn't have to harass you to get you to do your job."

She shot him an exasperated look on her expression, her hand rested on the counter alone now as Bojack's slipped away. Her slender hand rested on the counter, unmoving, her narrow eyes turned down for a moment as she kept her hand eased on the counter, and her other hand began to settle for scrambling beside the drawer beside her; Bojack could hear the sound of the plastic bag crumping beside her hand as she kept her eyes focused on the mundanity of the counter as she threaded and crumpled her hands beside the bag. Bojack watched it with an increased flair of exasperation; but the somber mature acceptance stayed on his face as he looked her over. The impatience on his expression increased as her felt his expression tremor into increased exasperation.

"Ok-so-" Bojack scratched the side of his cheek as he turned his eyes up in thought. His eyes "Are you going to get the drugs today, or do we need to wait for every nineties actor to resurge their career first? Even the second one is more likely at this point."

"I don't have any of the drugs with me, alright?" The swna's neck snapped forward as she kept her voice lowered, her slender eyes snapping over to where the man with champagne were talking to one another, her eyes darting to them in something cautious, then turned back to Bojack in panicked insistence. "That's the real reason why I'm tugging you back and forth."

Boajck's ears lifted. "What?"

"Just not for the time being. They'll get here soon." She sighed as she turned her eyes back to the screen, as if to end the conversation. "You're going to have to come back another time. I'll message you when I can."

"No-no, wait." He reached out a hand as he physically pressed it against her wrist-she shot it backward, disgust and defiance in her eyes, and Bojack's hand curled back as he offered her a grimace, but he recollected himself in his anger just as quickly. "You don't get to do that. I came all the way over here, I did all of this, and this is me, your current employee, who could essentially boss you if he wanted to, telling you to do a decent job at delivering your service. Your side hustle pow-wow business is going to the beefs if you don't hold up on this. This isn't some cutesy little side hookup you can change your mind on." His voice hitched up into a higher hitch of his voice, eyes hollowed in bewildered panic. "And by the way, why would you do all of this, make me take this poor woman who's already stumbling over her goodman feet, and having me, of all people, help her, and to get my hopes up for something to calm me down if you knew this would happen anyway?" His hands curled beside his hips as his eyes lowered. "Not exactly what I would call a bright move."

She turned her head back as she twisted her neck in tension against her clear lack of comfortability. Her discomfort was rippling through her body, her feathers ruffling under her conflict. "Relax. I didn't mean that you weren't going to get it today. Come back in an hour or two. These deliveries can sometimes be slow like that, more often than that."

He felt a white, stark relief flow through him, through it was hardly enough for him to calm down. "You could have specified."

He had felt his breathing increase right along with his admitted panic, and he tried to calm that riddled and familiar pattern of falling into a panic as he calculated the amount of time he had.

How much time until she comes back and finds out? Takes some people longer than others whenever you do this. I could distract and throw her off as best as I was able. Tell her to go get some concept or prize only boring people would love-she doesn't have a lot, so it should be enough for her to find some relief in it, She has no point of comparison. Then there won't be anything left except for whatever convincing excuse I can dress up.

His eyes were scanning the marble counter without truly seeing it. Finally did he turn his head back up the swan as he swallowed slightly, turning his eyes back over his shoulder to the two molded,, clearly well off men by the bustling, chin click sharp conversation smooth in a way he couldn't remember being himself for the longest days and his mind, not unlike now, was empty, disortinted; fogged up and sickly enough that he had forced himself to curl into sickly defeat and mundanity inside of her his for what felt like months before he had come upon you that day at the gas station. He watched them for a moment, not seeing much of anything in the middle of his chaotic panic.

"I understand that you're someone and that I'm nothing and I'm at the mercy of you because of that." The swan woman spoke with an even tone of something that begged to speak of something more; Bojack's timid and fearful eyes eased back up to her, emotion wide and fearful. "But I think we're both at the same mercy right now and need to find our peace, which is the same for everyone, not mater who they are in the literal world when it comes to being alone with raw thought, which most are. The fact that we don't truly see one another and realize how the same we are is humanity's biggest tragedy. I wasn't expecting the drugs to not be here by now. There was some dely. What I was referring to earlier was apart of it."

"One hour?" he asked, turning himself back towards her, eyes emotive and desperate.. She nodded as she looked at him with a certain distant, an almost pitying look inside of her eyes.

Somehow, that only served to make Bojack feel even worse.

Why am I being so manipulative?

And then a second thought-

I don't even care, either. Not compared to the way it's all been feeling lately. I never care. I don't think I should. This will all end and overlap into the same detached and stagnant disgust it always does eventually anyway.

The swan's woman's eyes were now completely dark and unreadable, save for the fact that there seemed to be something on a moral level that she knew that was only spoken through wordless emotions. It didn't-not to Bojack's troubled mind. It was ominous, a warning, and infurtaing all at once.

"One hour," she repeated. "And I promise you can get whatever you want. No more teasing, no more playbacks-promise."

"Sure," Bojack said dryly, voice lowered in and dripped in sarcasm as he looked away for a moment back towards the side of the marble wall. "One hour. No bullshit. Counting on it."

Another black sigh left his lips, his large teeth gently tethering on the side of his lips nervously for a moment as fingertips played against chubby wrists. His aggravation was getting the best of him, the jitteriness of his addiction that he could control only when he didn't promise himself some relief currently reaching its ending point.

``You better be right about the one hour."

"It was a lot. And unexpected. We'll be taking care of it. My line of getting money is on the line as well as yours." The swan woman's eyes titled over to where the door was where you had disappeared. "My advice-go to the woman. Stay with her. Having her company, up and down and sickly as it may be, is going to be the only thing in your life that is as impactful a smooch as your own company or the world's malicious and flawed company. It would do well for you to go to her and enjoy this-" Her large and luminous eyes tuned up to Bojack "-Especially if you haven't been feeling well as of late."

Bojack watched her for a long moment, hands playing against his wrists and ears lowered into a twisted melancholy of timid man and question. His tender eyes eased up as considered her for a moment; the fire of her eyes, the heavy and odd guilt in her expression as she spoke."Why are so concerned about her? Or what I do with her?"

"I saw something in her. I feel it now."

"What? Why is any of that your business?"

His voice, as exasperated and as shaky and uncertain however, had a certain layered tone underneath it that he was grateful you weren't around for; he had spent enough time with you that he worried you would be able to read him, a fact and a quality about your relationship that he had come to resent. It was a tone not unlike the sentiment of a scared child-but luckily for him, the woman in front of him didn't know him, and if she had, she couldn't have cared the way you did. His physiological insecurity was buried deep and secure under a thick layer of his protective grown physical masunulity to make him feel impenetrable and important, and the vast and common indifference of those around him.

"You think your existence is incredible and the center of the world and endlessly important, Bojack. And it is; but only because you were born into a sickly mind to protect you from realizing how unfathomably small and finite you are. Go to that woman, please; even the thought of you loving her and staying with her is enough to make everything a little bit easier. For all of us."

Bojack's eyes looked her over.

"What are you talking about?"

The swan woman's eyes fluttered down as she rolled her shoulders in thought, her mouth askew in some strange twist of thought as she fluttered her eyes down. Bojaack frowned as he heard more of the crinkling of the bag, and Bojack turned to her now fully as he looked her over with an increase sense of concern on his features.

"I've felt it lately-the retaliation that being human is suffering because we need people to feel relief, and people are sicily and terrible, horrible things at all hours, and even when people think they're doing right it's all still horribly, unfathomably wrong and people still add to the problem rather than take from it-especially for the truly suffering. The truly suffering are made the pinnacle of suffering on this earth. But the two of you-not to say that it isn't only concerned with the small island of both of your own benefit-but there's something about it that's so human that it feels like my benefit, too. Please go to her."

"Good talk," he said, patting his hands one last time against the counter as he hoisted himself off of it.

"Bojack." The swan's voice raised up into a wretch of desperation, and her body snapped forward as her palm gripped beside Bojack's arm.

"Hey-get off." Bojack tried to swat her away, and the swan did let go, but the desperation in her eyes was profound.

"Why are you gripping yourself into what I'm doing with the woman?"

"Because-" Her previously narrow eyes were currently widened as emotion flew through her eyes, her emotion streaming and hollowed. Her eyes turned down, and she eased her neck forward as she gave an abrupt breath. "Bojack, I need you to be by that woman."

"I am..going to her." Bojack's head titled as she looked the swan's sullen expression over. "But why do you care so much? With the way you're talking, I would think you were the one who needed some blow-or to have it taken away."

The swan's eyes turned up and met to Bojack's; she threw a small plastic bag onto the counter. Bojack's eyes widened as he watched the plastic bag thrown onto the counter; there was several handfuls of the blue glowing drug that Bojack had been waiting for. A fire flew across his eyes as he watched it thrown on the counter.

"Really?" His voice was edged with a sharp annoyance as he made his way to the counter, eyebrows raised as he looked over the blue material thrown onto the counter. He stopped his way in front of it so as to block it from being seen by the men. His eyes turned as he looked up at the swan woman, who kept her eyes fluttered down, lowered heavy with emotion and the blue hue of her eyeshadow easing heavy onto her expression as her white hands fell against one another.

"This dosen't count."

"It absolutely counts. Jesus-" Bojack's head turned down as he leaned down to look over at the drugs, hand placed beside the counter as he did so. His expression was empty and heavy as he looked up at the swan woman, who melted back. "Why did you keep this from me? This is the exact amount I ordered."

"This is what I wanted to use to show you what I meant. It was part of the delay-"

Her voice hitched as she gripped her hands beside the pebbles, and Bojack's eyes widened as he watched her ease her hands against it, stepping himself back in concern.

"There's something about the way they look. And when people take them-they start to hallincute."

Bojack's eyelids lowered. "Hallincate? Is that what we're calling normal drug effects now?"

"I'm sorry." The swan rolled her shoulders as she closed her eyes; the trouble on her face was authentic, and Bojack could feel a gradual sense of the reality of the tension and of the human suffering of the situation taking place. "People using the drug right now are talking about hallucinations of a specific family." Her eyes fluttered up as she met Bojack's troubled and questioning expression. "A family involving one you're the father of."

Bojack's hands eased in front of his chest as he met her eyes.

"Are you serious?"

"People have been saying they want to stay there; something that feels especially human, in a sense, or so they say.. Something that they feel saves them; they say it's warm, the way you love, the way that woman does."

"The woman?" Bojack turned his eyes over to where you had disappeared. His eyes eased back to the swan. "You're telling me people are seeing that nameless, faceless woman as something that's apart of their drug hallucination?"

"Not necessarily her. But-" The swan shrugged as she tilted her eyes up to meet Bojack's questioning ones. "Bojack, she has the same air. The same sense of some impossible warmth that I don't think people are even aware could be possible-the kind people are always robbing away from themselves. And the two daughters they describe-like nothing else, all things considered. The beauty of the black one, the midnights curls of her hair and that natural light in her eyes. I've seen it myself on the tips I've gone on, especially as of late, and they get more vivid every time. And I try to have a sense of shame about it, but I keep feeling myself as drawn to that family warmth of what all of you share-and the fact that in your actual life there's nothing but this empty reality, too much love and the want of love to give and having very little to any means of being able to actually come close to filling the void of that richness that it gave me-it's a sad thing to come to terms with. Go to the woman. The new drugs will be here freshy soon-onces they're assuming and hoping won't get people oddly addicted and attached to this desperate sense of warmth that they're getting from this family life."

Bojack's expression gazed at her tentatively. His fingertips eased beside his wrist while sad uncertain eyes, unable to be wise enough to carry his own relief, turned over the swan and the desperation of her emotion.

"How do you know it's me?"

"I can see it like anything. You're distinct, in a sense, Bojack, but especially in these trips. Handsome and carved in wrinkled face, plush stout body-that soppy, rich voice is certainly one we're all in tune with with the way you talk to your daughters."

"Wait." Bojack raised up his hand again, eyes begging and ears lowered as the swan turned her eyes to meet his. "I do not have two daughters."

The swan's eyes eased down in thought as she took a breath to restart. Her eyes turned over to the blue tinted crack of which Bojack had been told to come to get, and with a soft reset of her breath she turned the rocks against her hand. There were some small glimmers of them against her hand-the images seeming as if they were a reflection of a crowd od bodies for a moment. Bojack gave an abrupt timid breath as he stepped back, ears flown down.

"Look, I'm not supposed to dispense this out to anyone-especially not you. They don't' want people showing signs of addictions even more than most have. But I have some extra before they took the rest away-they don't want people to become so attached to this idea of this specific family."

"Well-" Bojack's hands played beside his palm. "Wouldn't it be for the best, in a sense, for the company? You could draw in an entire crowd."

"When the people come out of these hallucinations, they're so morbidly attached to that of which is around theme-or was around them-that they don't seem right. Anything but. They seem maddened, discontent with existence; we even had an incident a few nights ago where one of our customers took to trying to haunt and threaten one of the men who had the crack with him to sell the rest, and there was something close to a murder."

"Ouch." Bojack winced, sickly, as he cringed back. His eyes turned over the crack in her hand. "So-then, you want me to try and take it for myself, then?"

"I think it would be able to explain and execute what I'm trying to with you better than I could."

"And if I end up doing this delusional dance that yout tell me you're so not impressed with?" Bojack's eyes turned down into a jaded exasperation as he raised his arm mockingly beside him.. "You want to make this walking wreck worse than he is, is that it?"

"I don't know how else to go about communicating why I feel like this drug, this crack that this company felt they would rather spill out than get people addicted, can explain any better about why it feels so urgent to me. I don't think there should be any better way-I don't know how to explain it but my desire to give you this is beyond trying to be a decent receptionist, or an underhand crack giver, or anything else besides. I want to give it to you because it feels like something that I'll become punished for if I don't myself."

Bojack's eyes were hollowed as he turned his expression down and saw the way her fingertips were trembling as she took the blue crack and began to sweep it betwene her fingertips. Bojack's eyes grimanced as he watcher her fingers begin to crush it between her hands, and he saw her visbilly trembling as her eyes began to biome heated with a lght of something that Bojack couldn't deny had a sense of madness to it; her fingertips trembled, and her breath shook shakily.

'It feels like I was given the wisdom of every which problem I've ever had." Her slitted eyes turned up as her expression met Bojack's. "Universal wisdom and having a sense of character that is strong enough that you can find a rich rhythm with the world naturally is a rare gift-and you were given it, I think."

"You're talking to a guy who is literally skiing to smuggle drugs so I don't have to think about anything else."

"The woman and yourself, Bojack. Your family."

"Stop it." Bojack snatched his arms away from behind pulled in or even touched by her again, his eyes flaring up into a heat as he offered her a glare. "I don't have any of that. And as much as I'd like to take the crack, if you're going to keep making up stories like this, you're creeping me out just enough that I would rather not. So no sale for you."

"I felt the chemistry of that warm light of two people who love one another-an impossible and endless amazement. Even just to have this small group fo drugs with me now-it's more than I feel I can take. I didn't just keep it for myself for the sake of showing you."

"No?" Bojack's eyebrows raised, rubbing his fingertips beside his wrist. "What is the reason, then?"

"I want to drown myself in it. The feeling of how that woman sees and loves you-it's such a powerful force, love and family, that it's beyond what I can even imagine, and I can't stand the idea of being so close to it, to have even the slightest sense of having something so rare. I would o anything just to even observe it-"

Her throat choked, and Bojack's expression furrowed into further concern while he kept his fingers rubbing beside his wrist, if only to calm himself.

"It's not all just about your family." The swan woman seemed as if she was physically trying to keep herself from a certain episode, her body trembling as she kept her vision on the drugs. "There's so much truth and dispair in it, too-but it almost feels too true to turn away from. As if to look it in its eyes rather than denial and distraction is freedom."

As the swan woman's fingers' kept playing with the pebbles that were beside her fingertips, Bojack leaned forward as he watched the drugs easing between her fingertips. As he watched the blue orb of the crack ease beside her hand, Bojack saw a flash of another extension of a crowd of people and animals rushing through the jolsting crowd of one another, their bodies easing and swaying agaisnt one another as they made their way down a path, running against a grass hill. Their bodies were heavy and tormented, scratches beside their skin as they hunched down and continued to rush down the path; weight was on their bodies, and the sky as so mugged and foggy with black as the scratched and the soot was polluted beside their bodies as their hevy forms trudged through the path. Their voices were called out, hitching up into desperation as their dirty and heavy bodies contuiend to walk with one another in their sickly and impacted paee. They were ensalved and heavy, the dirt and soot of the ground and of the emotional deprived extnsion of hope that Bojack felt himself let out an abrupt grunt as he flew his body back with a timid breath as he tripped his feet backward, hands gripped beside his palm as he gave an abrupt grimance of his expression.

The quiet talk and muttering of the two men behind Bojack stopped in their talk, and then turned their head over their shoulder as they looked over to Bojack, who's eyes were bulged and grimaced as he looked at them with hollowed eyes, breathing in quick paced breaths. He collected himself in his panic as much as he was sable as he gave an abrupt chuckle, nervously chuckling as he looked between them while he raised his body up, adjusting the coat beside his body as he walked to the woman again, expression and pupils small with the treamoring fear.

"I told you."

Bojack tried to collect himself as much as he was able, giving off soft minute breaths as he did so. "What was that?"

"I usually focus on the family part-and anyway, anything else about it is just something that come about with the crack's made up biology, for whatever reason, Paranoia and other forms of negative happen with drugs all the time."

Bojack's eyes winced as he looked the swan woman over.

"So-why do you take it, then?"

"I just told you." Her voice was low, snapped into insistence. Bojack eased his body back as his hands raised in front of him in defense as he saw her head snap forward, her voice eased into a frantic whisper as she did so while she gazed at him frantically. "The feeling-the family. It's like nothing else." Her head cocked forward as she gazed over at the blue pebbles that were easing through her fingertips, gazing at them with a complicated melancholy of her eyes. "I think you should take some. Some of it-I don;t understand. But if nothing else, you should take it-see what it does. The other drugs will be here soon-you can have both if you'd like. But I feel the need to give this to you." She twisted her white fingertips beside the crack, the tormented and struggling people and the crowd of how they struggled against one another, the scowl of their expressions and the weight of their bodies rolled beside one another as they walked through the end of the cut opensky and the mog. "Plase-for both our sake."

"You really feed the need that desperatly?"

The swan didn't respond; the narrow of her eyes only stayed on the front of the blue tint of the material, though her eyes looked up at him insistenly, and Bojack couldn't deny the genuine look of emotion in her eyes.

Bojack raised a brow as he looked ovr at the swan woman respectively.-his eyes looked tentietly over to where he could se the occasional flash of the suffering people through the dirtiness of their rags.

"You're saying that you see two daughters and a family?"

The swan nodded abruptly, the urgency in her expression enlightening in her eyes. "One beautiful young black woman. Curved, sweet, light in her eyes; a graceful sophistication. The other-light and hope in her eyes, impossible to be able to not feel some form of hope with."

"I don't-see any of that." Bojack's eyes winced as he turned his head over to where he watched the crack of the blue tint ease beside the spaces of her fingertips, his hand gripping beside the counter."I only see this terrible bad thing."

The swan's mouth smirked in a small and bittersweet fashion.

"Maybe that has everything to do with what you hold inside of you, then."

Bojack's expression lowered; an authentic look of trouble and concern easing in his eyes.

"Maybe."

"Here." The swan eased the crack over to Bojack's fingertips, her eyes snapping up and over to where the other men were talking beside one another as their voices continued to trial in their mundane conversation. Her eyes flew down to where the crack sprinkled itself into Bojack's palm, and his heavied eyes eased forward as he watched the crack being spilt onto his palm. Her white fingers trailed against it, then rested and squeezed on the top of Bojack's fingers.

"Don't let the world manipulate you into thinking this isn't enough, Bojack." Her hands squeezed beside his hand as he gazed at her with questioning worried eyes. "The world is frustrated with the mundanity of its own existence; there's not much to achieve at the end of the day, or to not repeat what you have already achieved. This-" She indicated her eyes over to his fingers as she kept her hands squeezed beside Bojack's hands. "-Is something that can help you. This is something that is just as complex and ongoing as much as your own existence-which is all we crave. Don't let the world take it from you."

Bojack's eyes had a sense of genuine vulnerable fear and worry that was present with something that was tender and authentic now rather than judgemental; his teeth poked as he watched the blue tint being eased onto his palms. The material felt vaguely cold to the touch, and he curled his stout fingertips against it, turning his eyes over to the swan as he gave her an abrupt nod, small smile tugging on the edge of his lip.

"Thank you." Her hand began to slip away from his and she offered him a kind warm glance from her eyes. Her curled his fingertips against the material as he felt his eyes flicker over to the blue tint of the material while it poked out from the spaces of his hand; the image of that of which he had seen earlier was only a soft blue currently. "You're kind to do something like this."

It was the most authentic and genuine thing Bojack had spoken that night, and the swan woman only eased her eyes over him with a slight glint of her expression that seemed more mourning than flattered as she adjusted her body and straightened it back up to the computer. Her hands eased beside the keyboard as she began to tap her fingertips against it, busying herself as her eyes glanced over to the men that were murmuring.

"Go to her." The swan woman's voice was quick and distracted, and her eyes narrowd as Bojack saw her busy herself with the flashes of the boxes beside the screen and into her eyes while her fingertips tapped frantically beside the keys.

Bojack's eyes lowered as he looked over the material, then gripped it beside his palm as he eased it closer to his pocket. He turned his eyes up as he met the woman's eyes; she snapped her gaze up to him only for a moment, but the connection that had been there previously was now reduced back to her robotic toll.

Bojack's expression treamored into a curious fear as he eased his hands beside the blue material, squeezing it against his hands before he placed it into his pocket. He didn't want to take it yet; despite the temptation that he had to ease the black edge of the nerves that were crossing over his mind and every thought, he wanted to remain at least in a somewhat decent headspace to see you and check to see if you were still in a somewhat decent, stable headspace yourself before he followed through with his pathetic and timid fear and his usual form of chaos. His troubled, enduring soft and aged sculpted eyes turned up to the swan.

"We're still exchanging through bodies later, right?"

She didn't respond; she was clearly executing her intention of separation now, and instead her head was titled up and her narrowed eyes swept through the screen. Bojack's aged and troubled eyes turned over to the material, and with a soft tension on his features did he begin to walk his way over to the same archway of which you had disappeared. His hands tapped beside the pockets in the front of his gray coat as he tapped his hands beside his front pocket where he would have had a cigarette; though it took a moment for his palms to find it, he felt a small, cheap paper stick that met behind the flimsy material of the grye coat. His eyebrows lifted up in contentment as he reached his hand into the pocket, much as he could feel relief, and then took the mostly seared and torn stick in his hand as he pulled it out.

His fingertips played with the cigarette in his pocket as he began to make his way to the swirling of the stars that were coming from the entrance of the exhibit. As he began to make his way toward the immservie center of the blue light and the galactic space that dressed the ceiling and the floor, head turning up in his own wonder and question now that his own fakery towards want of ego was falling away where there was a pure and curious heart, he could already feel the air of the blue light tracing the edge of the side of his face as he felt it overcome his senses.

He took a breath as he turned his attention upward, looking at the reflective light of the blue space as it dressed the floor and the ceiling that wrung in front of him. His nerves were eased only by the resetting of a his body as much as he could manage as he pressed the stick against the edge of his face, the stick delicately balanced in the spaces of his fingertips in a way only he could manage after years of the action, the tips of his fingertips taking to scratching that familia scar that was pressing into his skin over a period of time from the same nervous action.

He made his way through the front of the hallway as he took in the details on the wall that were dressed in the white canopy of the light of the fabricated stars that were dancing on the walls, ones of which were already dressed with the sculpture of the details of the faces that were emerging from the details of the renaissance of the design. It would have been beautiful, but Boajck's vision was tinged with a black lace of panicked insecurity and barely focused sight in the middle of the despair he was feeling that was somewhere between his addiction that had triggered it, and the place from where he had been far too many times before; the imprecetable frustration of some wrought and complicated part of the human psychological state of his mind that had been built over over a gradual period of time from everything he had ever known dressed up only in negativity. Every piece of something that had built onto who he was and into something he could feel in control and familiar with; hardly understandable in the wake of the sense of something that made sense, had a rich sense of hope of what you inspired out of him. There were too many reasons for who he was and what he had become-it had long since surpassed any coherent or singular reason, and that was the heaviest understanding of him all-having long since being able to understand it, but only being drawn to it time and time again if only for the sense of familiarity it gave Bojack in the middle of what waas an inherently exhausting, terrifying and empty existence.

The sculptures seemed as if they were carved into a hollow twists of something that was either melancholy of a fear; both woman and chubby faces of babies the same. The one thing he had never been able to understand, and the frustration of all his misery of himself of who he was, was how it had gotten so intertwined within the chaos of the world that it seemed as if, at some point, rather than knowing who he was and letting that help him navigate new decisions and the world, he had instead allowed the world to tell him who that was, and the problems and judgments thrown on him was a demand and factual state of character. He carried himself with exhausted loathing, with just as much as anyone or anything he had intentionally wounded with hardly veined hurt-what was inherently wrong with him that it led to a path of misery, even when he loved himself as much as he understood that concept, was beyond him.

"Forget this."

Bojack muttered the words under his breath as his heavy expression turned to the crack that the swan had given him, eyelids heavy and pupils small and dilated as he gripped his hand beside the bottle and winced while his fingertips eased beside the top of it. With a troubled breath of anticipation such as it was whenever he took the stimulation of any material, he gripped his hands into his pocket and eased the crack out, aware of the stick he had harbored in his fingertips to fall to the floor as his eyes winced while he looked over the crack that was in his hands, his palms trembling, but his decision offering him a resolve as he looked with over, mouth pressing together in an ease of worry, eyes winced, breath troubled.

He felt the ground shift under him almost as soon as he threw his head back and threw the crack into his mouth. He rolled his eyes at his own delicacy, exasperated at the fact of how easily affected he was. Still, it persisted. He tried to stop the sudden trembling of the surrality that was brought on by the increased rotten black that pressed inside him, seeming to smog around him in the form of trembling hands complimented by a heavied, struggling breath. The walls began to blur together as he scratched the side of his face again in that same troubling and erratic nature. The walls were familiar and distant at the same time as they blurred together, the sounds of the distinct chattering behind him caught on by the muttering of the two figures behind him. The fogginess was increasing, and it seemed little was interested in giving him a moment to breath. Bojack felt his body stumble to the side of the wall as he winced again, his hands trembling beside the black of his suit as his eyes winced and felt his fingertips ease beside the details of the craving of the walls beside him, hands trembling and as he tried to keep himself at least somewhat grounded while he watched the people blur together in the middle of the glasses they had balanced in the spaces of their hands as they talked to one another with high pitched laughter, Bojack fitting in only to the extent that he was wearing somehitng that made him look the part, though the lost old wear and the trouble on his face gave him away plenty.

"Where did you go?"

He grazed a hand against the edge of the wall for the sake of grounding himself in the midst of the swirling reality that was grazing against the walls, spun up further from the loud overhanging voice and the projection of the black of the lights coming from th exhibit and the spots of the while light surrounding the top of the walls against what looked like was usually a renaissance building.

He let out a shaky breath as he lifted his eyes towards the hallway, increasingly blurry eyes taking in the patterns of the galactic light and the monotoned voice that graced through the heavy space of the air. His dry lips smashed together, breath shaky and wobbling in his lack of focus. The monotone voice continued to drawl on in its information dumping, as indifferent and uninterested in his own discomfort as it came.

In the eyes of the stars, there's hardly anything except for a whirling ball of light, and even that we can't understand. If you were to be near it, it would hardly be peaceful; or so we assume. From afar, stars are much better and easily observed. The same could be said about the universe; there is very little to be understood about it, or even ourselves, and no matter what kind of situation you find yourself in, you can take some relief in the fact that everyone is just as lost as the other in the expanse of our existence. In this sense, we are all lost and stumbling, and there's no boundary of how things should be when taken into account outside of what the small islands of people say there should be. Mundane comfort and needs should be dealt out to all people, no matter what or how it looks-the order of peace is at the core of what we all want. This, if nothing else, is something we understand.

"Hey!" He called out toward the curtains of the theater where he could hear where the projected voice was emitting from. His eyes were wincing, ears lowered, stout body leaned forward and looking as sickly and pathetic as he came. He gave a shaken breath as he saw more blurring from the side of the curtains; several of the parties of people were ducking their way inside, talking to one another lowly. "You there?"

Though he tried to sound strong, or at least somewhat functional, his words sounded awkward and angry, showing off his lack of control. His feet stumbled as he felt the familiar signs of choking panic slamming into his air when he saw those familiar lights of the galactic sky born space that sputtered in its endless light of the black fabrication of the sky that continued to move around the exhibit like a spotlight. Bojack stumbled through the open area where there was the large marble surrounding of the floor and the several feet long from one large and detailed renaissance wall and over to the other, the high sky ceiling raised up and forward with the chandelier swinging above Bojack. The curtain of where the monotone voice was trailing from was taking place behind the purple curtain, the couples swaying beside one another as they ducked their way in and made their way inside the swaying purple swinging of it, and Bojack followed his increasing lack sense of reality over to the purple curtains, giving his troubled and low breaths as he did so while he tripped over his feet and made his way to the swinging curtains, tripping and easing his way through the more dignified and sophisticated curves of the woman and the men beside him, talking in a clear and confident context unknown to Bojack's chaos, as his troubled eyes focused on the curtain while he made his way forward. He did see a flash of that familiar strangled pale hair as it flashed across his eyes. His ears perked up as a vague sense of relief turned over his expression, light in his eyes as he shoved his way over to where he saw that flash of pale strangled hair.

"Excuse me." He shoved his way past the curves of the people, focused on the relief recognizing you gave him. Though Bojack had challenged himself to attempt to become apart of a peace with nothing as much as anyone human could manage, he couldn't deny the relief that he felt seeing you was greater than he could attempting to convince himself to be without.

"Hey, stranger." He was panting with a bit of heaviness, though his voice kept that playful charm to it. "Did you disappear into the black space? These theaters are more terrible than they look."

He would've detested just how boyish he sounded, had it not been for the fact that he was too much under the process of stimulants to perceive much of anything except for how desperate he felt to stay by that relief. He grazed his hand against the curtain as he felt the way it swept back, taking another breath as his pupils kept small with his worried trouble while he stumbled his way inside, the hallways narrow with black walls and and the people continuing to crowd inside the hallway with Bojack as his eyes were kept dilated and troubled while he continued to eased his way around the people talking.

"You're here, right? You didn't leave me?"

There was some muttered chuckling that came from the inside of the leathered seats that were sitting in front of a large screen a few feet ahead as the black hallway gave out to the large theater area.. The horns of a goat couple squirmed against one another while their chattering continued to pollute the air. Several bits and rushes of movement came from every which one of the chairs. The projection of the fake galactic light as it projected across the walls, this time more vivid than the last, turned out and dressed on the chairs and the floors of the walls, dressing beside the molds of the features of the woman who were laughing beside the well off men they were flirting with, their lips rich with red, eyes gleaming and humored while the men humored themselves in much of the same ease of the rhythm of conversation.

There was a heaviness to the atmosphere; he wanted to leave as soon as he entered, beautiful and as drenched in light as it came. There was an understanding in the foggy but ultimately naturally wise mind of Bojack that any challenge or loss ahead was only difficult from a matter of lack of readjustment than it was the perception of the loss itself; and that if there was a chance you were prey to contemptment from the people surrounding you, it wasn't to do with any lack of virtue from your end, but humanity's natural way to be attracted towards the trashy and the superficial and sinful; and to disregard the pure. He had been one countless times; he could feel as to how he was one now, even with just the drugs he had taken, the blurriness of his denial. Nothing had never been able to take on the large and ever going extent of the emptiness of existence; everything had stagnated and become overdone eventually. In the wake of how Bojack felt towards you, whether it was just what some sickly alone and low person could settle with that made it seem rich, or whether it was because there was some odd spiritual gift of endurance, he had the incentive to feel that there would be something very enough about what you did for him.

He stumbled over his feet as he made his way down the aisle. There were certain patterns that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life; the first addiction, and the second memories. He felt a strange suffocated promise that neither of these things would ever leave him alone-most especially when he did everything he could to stumble away from threads of black promise of loathing and mistakes that had never hesitated on its leering threads of fingers that came from moments where he knew himself and yet didn't, where he had thrown himself into the pits of what was always on him but that he didn't always chose to fall into-and yet here he was. And he had, and those broken shards of a impulsive choice had had no disinterest in haunting in the patterns of how others looked at him with disdain, with the ticks his mind played on him in the middle of what could have been otherwise an unremarkable activity and dare sometimes he even think moments of a peaceful mind-the one thing he had never had.

"Did anyone see a woman? Entering with a much…larger man?" He bounced on his feet, trying to see past the chairs as he managed to sway his way through the rest of the crowd. His teeth poked from his grimacing expression as his troubled eyes turned to the screen; nothing but the core of the projected galactic light for the time being.

More quiet laughter occupied the space in response, indifferent to Bojack's question; it seemed to be the only human sound in that otherwise disquieted atmosphere of the grim space.

He pressed his body against the side of the black wall for a moment to attempt to get away from that sense of the disorientation that surrounded his foggy vision, especially as the rich and the intimacy of the space, despite its disregard to Bojack, crossed past hm in empty indifference. His eyes continued to be unfocused as the chairs blurred together. His panic was pounding against his chest with very little, if any, sense of mercy. The lights flashed through the edge of the dark space, temporarily blinding his eyes as he instinctively pressed a hand to his eyes, grimacing as his expression furrowed in trouble. His eyes widened as he looked up in front of the theater that was made slightly more visible from the flashing of the light that came from the turning spotlight that blinded him for a moment, feeling his mouth dry as he started to gaze up at the blurring of the light that crossed his vision, the lack of focus of his eyes made increasingly worse.

He tried to collect himself as best as he was able while he forced his slouched and stout body to ease off of the wall. With one hand on the curve of his stomach, eyes wincing in trouble as he swayed, and with teeth poked did he begin to ease himself off of the wall. He started to rush his way through the chairs after he took a moment to tentatively look over the audience for any sign of you-he felt not even the slightest bit of shame while he stumbled through the aisle and continued to desperalty look for you-or, at this point, any kind of familiarity that could offer him any kind of coherent comfort in general.

He could now make out that there were only a couple of people sitting in the chairs, and every one of them seemed at ease looking over at him with a glint and a murmured talk and some low laughter between them.

"My god, that's not the guy, is it?"

"He's as big and as a mess as they come if he is. Almost too funny."

"I heard he was coming today. Along with one of his girlfriends. Looks like she ditched already."

"Sir, are you-"

He turned on his heel as he met eye to eye with a blinking and younger looking porpcciune, giving a alight and abrupt offput yell as his ears flared up, eyes wide and fearful as he turned around in a timid fashion. The porcupine was gazing up at him with an expression that was clearly meant for mockery. Bojack snapped his arms against his chest, trying to be able to afford any kind of defense, despite the ringing in his ear and the spots of his vision.

"Did you follow me here?" Bojack's voice was fearful as much as it was tentative and pathetic, his fingers grazing frantically beside his palm. "Are you the reason why I can't find my woman?"

"Kid, you're not going to make it far in this life if the main thing you do is to ask important people questions if things that are clearly cliche and bothersome to them." The porcupine indicated his head abruptly to the nearby theater chair; Bojack's eyes were melted in insecurity as hs hands kept pressed together in a rubbing fashion as his worried eyes eased to the chair. The porcupine tapped his hand beside Bojack. "Get in, then. And take it easy. You're scaring half the audience."

Bojack's eyes narrowed as he felt some of his sharp wit coming back, and his usually detestment that he had towards most came over him as he remembered the comfort it gave him to weaponize it against anyone who tried to throw him.

"And I'm not going to entertain some hormonal parasocial relation phase you're going through by gifting you the comfort of thinking that I tolerate the culture of looking at me like a sellout that should be told what to do." Bojac tapped his finger on the front of his snout. "And I do mean that especially tonight because I paid for a lot for both me and the woman. Who I would be thrilled to be able to find, by the way, if you could point me to her."

The porcupine let out a scoffing giggle.

"I don't care," the porcupine said earnestly. "But it seems like everyone else does." He turned his head over to the audience; Bojack's eyes flared open as he felt a fear overcoming his features while he followed his gaze and looked over to where he could see several people talking to one another lowly, their words darted over to Bojack while he daw how they glanced at him and where his stout body was swaying in the aisle through the context of the conversation.

"Oh. Huh. So you're a sheep now? That's your big claim to the 'disrespect establishment'?" He waved up his hands mockingly, his eyes glaring in a threat, as much as someone could who was as clearly aged, helpless, and exhausted as much as Bojack was. "You're not as tough or as edgy as you think you are. Ruining someone's maybe ok day when I'm clearly trying to figure shit out isn't as admirable as you think."

He was breathing heavy again as he finished his point with spite, signifying his aggravation while his ears flew back. ''Is that what you want? Because you're succeeding, spike brain."

"My god, Dad, you have that fire in you more than I remember. Too bad you couldn't have saved it for the part of the story where we needed it."

That honeyed voice, graced with a sense of charmed humor from the past that the thorns an odd memory that felt like it was sharded through small hints in ways of both subcicnious and literal, was coming out in the middle of his disorientation. The sound of the sudden change to something feminine, gentle, and at an ease with something naturally soothing was the only thing that brought Bojack out of his superior's aggravated aggression. He felt the world and his perception of it physically changing up and around him; even just down to something as simple as emotionally as the atmosphere seemed lighter, less fogged over with weight. He blinked rapidly, teeth poked.

His ears lifted up as he swung himself around and away from where the porcupine had been where the gradual curving of a beautiful and youthful body was standing, on edge as he looked around the waving space of the edged dizziness of the walls.

"Stop it. You're a trip." His hand pressed beside his snout as he closed his eyes. "Just a trip. A crazy one, because I'm terminally attached to a young and troubled woman. That's all."

"Please. I know we're wise enough to know this is the core of everything. Dad. For a minute."

Bojack was giving out his continued troubled breaths, though the stable maturity and the odd wisdom that grazed what he could recognize as his daughter's voice caused a light and admiration to gradually turn over that denial of panic that surrounded him, as it was with anyone that possessed any virtue, even if only of character. He found that that naturally graceful, charismatic and feminine low voice full of emotional intelligence and of a small piece of a life trailed from a lifetime of what had been discovered and lived before; and as he turned, he felt himself accepting the pain that came with the meaning of life's joy; the pain that would have killed him off sober that he could only suspend enough in its weight because of the drug and how it took him away from himself; just as he was turning to look that the exquisite and unique beauty of the half grown midnight horse woman in his swaying preception now.

A singular familiar and youthful face stuck out from the edge of the black mane that was long and curled with intention and care, the curls illuminated against the space of the galactic light; the tousled hair of something of midnight curls and of pure black midnight skin of her hair, graceful and well endowed with a life of intention and organized family life, the only thing giving away a life not worth celebrated was how the vivid imaginary of her slender and curved body with its dressing up of her midnight curls over her shoulder seemed not in relation to what was around her, the sides of her existence blurred out in multiple directions with that flair of artistic uncare that he dressed himself into so easily in the past that has always been attractive in a business where there was nothing but a lack of care for anything but superficial progression.

He was taking into his daughter entirely; she drew him in with a heavy purpose deeper than his own understanding of his existence; the midnight skin and curved specific small narrow eyes and orange glint of his daughter, Samantha.

Recognition, an odd mirror of something that washed over him more than he was able to understand but that seemed to sweep over him with an understanding bigger than himself, overcome Bojack even in the midst of his own drug induced episode. As he took in the slender body of the slender and curved body in front of him, he found it was the closest thing to softness he had felt since he had woken up with his clumsily executed body lying next to you that morning.

A choking left him as he breathed out the simple name, "Samantha."

His voice was somber, artistic, gentle in his exhaust as he gazed at her with a soft wince in his eyes, showing off his irreparable gentle timid uncertainty-and the gentle and natural fatherly nature of that of which he possessed. It came out in full now, from the worn wrinkle of his expression to the odd natural clumsy endearing and soft lovability that he carried in the emotion of his eyes as the tension across his features. His stout fingertips cramped beside his palms as he turned his hand forward to his chest, ears lowered as he met Samantha's curved and specific orange tinted wonder of eyes. He knew her as he knew himself; entirely, no choice but to be fully embedded within her detail and his understanding of her even with the chaos of constant changing identity; he simply knew her, even as the chaos and possibility of the world continued to move and change ever passing in a constant tend of bewilderment; and yet when it came to looking into what he could somehow recognize as his daughter's eyes, he felt a centerment unlike anything; not unlike the way he did with you.

A smile grazed Samantha's snout; there were small details about her that Bojack was enticed with that he could have sworn he felt and was aware of before as if he had known it as much as he knew every mundane detail of his own aged expression; the poke of her white teeth that was permanently poking out of her lip awkwardly, reminiscent of the way Bojack only did when he was nervous, at contrast with the black of her midnight skin, a shyness easing up through the unique mold of her eyes that were raised into a sharp squint of their delicate molding that had stood ou in their specific carving that had caused her to stand out in that exquisite and beauty kind of way; the pull over of her midnight waves that sat access eeys that were charismatic and confident, but glimmering into something of an odd shyness, tender and tried, and almost seeming too graceful to be believable.

"Hi, dad." Her slender midnight fingertips threaded across the spaces of her hands, turning up into them as they enfolded into the spaces, her palms resting beside the front of the glimmering white slender of a dress drenched in sequins. Her eyes flicked up as she looked up at Bojack. "Nice to see some old faces around a bad place, right?"

This was the last place he wanted to be, but he felt propelled now for digging further into whatever had brought him here, and what was guiding him to it.

"I don't know you." Bojack out one of those frantic, clumsy breaths of his as his pupils began to dilate and became smaller as his eyes darted in a vague panic. His ears lowered as his hands came to grip beside his ears, turning his head down as his worn eyelids closed. "I don't understand what this is. I shouldn't be here-seeing this."

"I don't know what to tell you."

"What are you?" Bojack's panicked eyes were still dilated as he snapped his head up over to his daughter. Somehow, he knew who she was; and she seemed extended into a level of self awareness, though she was tentative, bewildered herself as her body swayed. "There's a reason why I'm seeing you. I know it's not because you're…here." He gave another abrupt rasp breath as his pupils dilated downward. "This isn't right." His head snapped over his shoulder as he looked down the aisle of the chairs beside the dilation of his eyes. "I need to find that woman."

"I don't have a sense of awareness as much as I'd like. But I do know who you are. The same way that I would know what weather would feel good if I needed it, if I was falling apart because of some decision-I know who you are. It's disorienting-but I do feel memories, a life in me."

Samantha began to walk herself through the aisle, her head ducked down as the midnight of her curls swung in front of her snout, herself walking her way forward as her eyes darted up to Bojack, head titled down as she walked her way through the aisle. She had some sense of self awareness to her in terms of knowing how big and off of a step was this was for the bith of them; her hands were encircled against the embrace of themselves, her head turned forward as the squint of her eyes looked up to Bojack with a soft ease of shyness. The galaxy of the blue reflected across her snout as it glimmered across her eyes while she peaked over at him through the projected of the cut through of the blue galaxy and the stars spotted against it. It caressed her beauty for a moment as the spotlight temporarily traced against her features and then passed by; she was a tentative beauty, reminiscent of Bojack, and her slender body curved as she walked her way forward while she stepped her way through the aisle, the outline of her body blurred and curved through the seamlness end of the area of what surrounded her while she walked her way down it.

Bojack took a point to step his way back, hands eased beside his chest while his eyes dilated and pupils were small in panic as he met his daughter's low, shy questioning eyes.

"I'm having an episode, right? You're messing with me."

Samantha shrugged, leaning against the nearest arm rest, as if to give the heated panic in Bojack's eyes some space. "I don't think you need to worry about being defensive in this case. I don't understand it, either-for now." Her slender midnight hand swept across her arm, tentatively, her eyes squinted as she looked him over. "But we can try."

"No." He pressed a hand to the mark on his cheek, scratching it frantically."No, I know you're not real, because those obnoxious satanist horndog goat things haven't even looked at you." His eyes kept that tentative wince in his wet expression as he turned his melancholic eyes to where he could see the rich leaning against the theater chairs in their rich contentment, their bodies leaned back, glasses traced in the spaces of their fingers as they leaned their bodies back across the chair, arms slung agaisnt one another as they raised their glass into the air. A vague knowing judgmental insult eased into Bojack's eyes while he looked at them with a puffy eyed glare, though nothing could get rid of that odd tender but wounded emotion that glinted and was buried in his eyes, made further from the inspiration he had gotten from taking Samantha in. "No way those annoying, entitled rich asssholes would pass up that opportunity."

Samantha laughed, her voice low in a feminine fashion, low and charismatic and layered with emotional intelligence, and Bojack couldn't deny he felt himself in the sound. He gave an abrupt breath as he tried to readjust his focus as he kept his troubled, wet eyes towards the two goats in question. Light sparkled in Samantha's eyes of that humor that had always added an extra layer of casualty to any given situation.

"Theyareannoying, aren't they? Reminds me of all the types of woman and men you and mom had to fight so I could do what I wanted." Her ears lowered, eyes turned down in thought. "That's how I remember it, anyway. As much as the memories will allow me to. They come and go like a fog, all things considered." Her eyes turned back up to Bojack tentatively; there was something outlandish in them, a sense as much as the blur of the lines of her body would allow in regards to the hints of the otherworldliness of where she had came; a heaviness to her that seemed to suggest her fight of her own existence, a certain sickly fight in it, not unlike the way Bojack always had with something inherently sick in him. She was beautiful, sophisticated-young. Bojack felt overtaken by some natural tender resounding sense of a fatherly desire he had to be by her, protect her; how sophisticated he felt in the wake of seeing her in an odd fashion of another version of himself he could see flashing in front of his vision that came along with an odd sense of dignity and grace of a version of himself that could have existed had he managed to live an admirable life of love.

Boajack's ears lowered, his eyes wincing as he looked Samanhta over, breathing coming out in caution.

"Your mother and I did all of that for you?"

"And I don't regret a moment of being able to do it. Not if the thread of my life as I know it and the strength of it, the warmth of the fulfillment I found tell me anything. It was my purpose, what you and mom gave me, even though I know how hard it was for the two of you at times." She indicated her head towards the seat. "No more technical questions, dad. I want to talk. I know from anything, if nothing else, from where I came from that love and a place isn't promised; some people don't have the proper attributes to be loved, can't find the person with the patience to. I know you thought you were that for so long, dad-and mom took you from that. In ways that I can feel I still want for myself, to understand; emulate." Her eyes turned down in thought, glimmered and reflected by the neon light. "As much as I was ever able to understand. And if there's any chance I can."

Bojack was disoriented and panicked enough that he could take the surreality of the suspension of what was happening around him as something that was worthy of taking seriously; not so much for credit from his end, but moreso from the natural drawing towards what he had with Samantha that as powerful enough that he couldn't stand to turn himself away from it; to not insist on turning it into reality more than a fleeting emotion; an experience Bojack had far too frequently.

"Technical questions are just regular questions with non- technical answers." He rubbed his arm with his hand, mirror to hers, then snapped his arm beside him as he asked; "What's technical about asking for the truth?

"See, this was always the problem with you. Or-from what I remember, the arguments we had. The reason why we couldn't always come to agreement."

Bojack's expression furrowed into a frown.

"Problem with me?"

Samantha leaned back as she allowed her body to curl against the chair, her dress shimmer beside the ovetide of the light. "You never let loose. It was one of the reasons why neither of us ever let go. Even though we should have. Whenever we disagreed, I mean. Maybe one of the reason why mom kept falling sick-" She gave a shrug of her slender shoulders. "I don't know."

Boajck watched her slender form for a moment, beautiful and graceful and thin with her hair reflective against the neon light, reminiscent of the star quality both with personality and appearance wise that Bojack could see in her. She seemed as if she was both his nightmare and his wonder of blessing at the same time; he saw himself in everything about her, in how she moved and the meditative and secret glint in her eyes that spoke of muddled and easily corrupted character, but with that natural savviness she carried of something that natural spoke of something worthy of higher status; or at least the pursuit of her own admirable air. Bojack blinked as blurry vision traced the edge of her glowing and pale shine of black hair as it contrasted against the black atmosphere.

"Do you remember?" Samantha's head turned over to Bojack, her head titled to the side as she met his eyes in a genuine glint of something familiar and enticing to pull out any memory he could come up with. Bojack felt his eyes widen and hollow as he felt a flash of an odd familiar memory ease through his core of his spirit whether he intended for it to or not; he was surprised at the familiarity of it, the demand of it, the way it felt so naturally embedded into a memory.

"You have no idea what kind of pressure I was always going through. I didn't have time to play dollhouse or pretend, honey."

He felt as if he was speaking something that was remnisncent of speaking a puppet of a past self he had; as if he were speaking the ghosts of a version of himself that had existed or did exist, and now he took to echoing the words as the felt the puppet of his past memory emulate with him.

Samantha's eyes snapped up, executed further from the blue as it flashed across her uniquely striking eyes.

"So you do know about our life? You have the memories?"

"No!" Bojack's eyes hallowed, and he turned his eyes to the side in troubled thought, and then felt the husked admittance of; "I don't know."

"And you don't know, but you have time to buy your blow?"

That familiar endearing smile, crooked in overspilled teeth and well wrought in youth and familial intention, grazed the edge of her smile that was curved around her poked teeth as her mouth lifted felt his face fall as he turned away, eyes gazing into the moving starry space in front of him, revolving in indifference.

"That's-different." He winced as he felt his eyes glare over to Samanhta; and yet that impossibly tenderness he felt looking into her overcame him more than he knew how to take. "You do know that whatever 'life' you think this is-I've never been aware of any of it."

"Always is with you. When you want it to be."

Though the words were jabbing, there was a lightness to the way Samantha spoke them; and he saw the humor in her eyes. As fogged as much as the possible memories he had with her were, he could recognize the dynamic between them; the richness and understanding came out him as easy as anything, not unlike that natural sense of belonging he had just by being around that of which made him feel that tender admirability.

Boajack's lips raised up into a smile as he chuckled instinctively. For better or for worse, Samantha and her presence seemed innately understood for him;as natural and as at ease with his rhythm as much as he had felt with you, with the same amount of warm rich caution towards being close to her as with you; but the drugs were keeping him calm, accepting, indifferent to his circumstance; welcoming and soothing into it.

"Come on, dad." Samantha's eyes eased up to his in that still same warm but confident and teasing humor as she readjusted her body by the chair, leaning back as she indicated to the empty one beside her. "Stop pouting like a pantsy and get over here."

Her teasing was familiar, not unlike everything else about her, from how her body moved to the vague teasing of emotional intelligence was executed in her eyes. Bojack's eyes lowered as his expression turned over to the chair where she was indicated, his fingertips playing beside his palms as he gave a soft breath of his agreement while he began to walk forward, ears lowered. He cleared his throat as he managed to clam himself enough to dig at least somewhat into his wit, though he felt his eyes give away some of his tremor of his shyness and of that human fear that carried him as he met Samantha's confident gaze; something Bojack had come to learn he had long since lost in her eyes; a natural confidence she had towards being alive in her own truth.

"Sitting next to a half imagined daughter. Why not. Those are my prospects."

The joke didn't land on his anxiety as much as he would have liked-it felt as if it hung on dead air that deepened the uncertainty that traced his thought, and the depth of how joy and devastation intermelded as he began to trip his way past the theater chairs, giving a soft uncertain breath as he began to shoulder his way beside the leather chairs, arms stuck out, mouth twisted, eyes dilated in both fear and wonderment. Nothing in his life had had the presence and effort Samantha and you had; and in the middle of his drug ridden and fogged state, he couldn't deny the detrimental attachment and almost survival need of desire he had to be with it.

The light glinted on the edge of Samantha's eyes as the spotlight of the galaxy continued to spread across the side of the space. Above, the monotoned narration continued to flow with the rest of the area, booming with its monotoned narrative as if it were plunged underwater. "Worse has happened than just the disorientation of this, right?"

A knowing, dark small smile traced Bojack's lips; though the fatherly tenderness in his eyes didn't leave the majority of his air as he eased his body down and sat into the chair. His hand came to rest by his ankle as he slung a leg beside his thigh. "Sure."

There was a moment of thickened hesiencey, his lips pressing together, and then apart, as he tried to come up with something to say. The feeling of his fingertips pressing against one another, a shaky breath that felt as if it physically flowed through him. The ringing increased in his ears, buzzing with a loud noise that hardly seemed forgiving, his eyes, tender with confliction, continuously snapping up to his daughter, who seemed to be settling for keeping her eyes down as she gaze at his lap without direct connection immediately; her eyes occasionally coming up to meet Bojack's. And then-

Acceptance flew through him like a wave. His eyes could barely see anything in the midst of the flooding of his disorientation, and he couldn't make out anything with the raging sensation of his veins that came along with the panic he was fighting. Still, there was a new profound sense of stillness in him that hadn't been there before in the wake of someone that knew him best-and to add onto the power of that of which was occurring around him; a sense of resolve towards it, full acceptance, and with it; the resounding and rich sense that came along with something as profound as losing a daughter, strong enough that he could hardly comprehend it, almost too heavy for him to even accept the depth of it that came along with the meaning.

"Alright. You win. We'll talk." His body leaned back on the chair, and his eyes lowered as he raised up a hand in a pointed gesture, ears lowered as his dry eyes met her lighter and questioning ones; "Only because I'm too tripped out to say no."

A cocky eyebrow quizzly raised itself up on Samantha's expression as she inched further against the seat. "I want this to be something that we both can get something out of. I don't want to fight. We've already done that enough as it is." Her face hestiaited for leaning beside Bojack's shoulder; but as Bojack allowed his body to lean beside her, eyes drenched in the questioning of his eyes as he felt her body easing beside his shoulder while he eased the tension out of his air enough for her to lean her cheek beside him, she allowed her cheek to come to lean closer.

"You would think that." Bojack's eyes dared down in thought; he was swimming through the emotional memories and the fog of them; they wee full of depth and of something tangible and real, and something he felt he wanted to kept gripped onto. His eyes winced in a soft and considerable pain. "Everything I ever did-it was because I was trying to help you."

"I know." Samantha's cheek nudged further beside Bojack's shoulder, and he allowed his cheek to lean onto the top of her head.

"Did you? Or-do you?" His eyes darted down in question, wincing as he thought it over in his consideration as to how he was talking to Samanahta; he felt as if he were talking in measurements, attempting to guide time of something that was happening in present time even as he was, and something of a past nature of memory.

Samantha hesitated, and Bojack could sense that there was something in her eyes that was genuinely thinking it over.

"I know you're trying. As much as the insecurity of your mind and the sickness it brings allows you to."

"Oh."

"Mom always said that whatever it was you were so sick and worried about, that she felt none of it would ever be worth the comparison of losing the health of your mind over." Samantha's head turned up to Bojack, her eyes glimmering against the light as her midnight waves fall down her shoulder and across her expression. Bojack's eyes eased down in tender thought. "She was right.'

"Right." His eyes, hooded in thought and his overly wrought familiar sense of shame, turned as his emptiness eased across his daughter's eyes. "I guess that would explain all of this going on, then."

"Maybe." Her voice was soft, a trail of an end of an understanding of a conclusion, not unlike the few senses of spiritual clarity of something beyond anything Bojack could have understood the few times he had taken to sitting on the rooftop; overlooking the expanse of the foggy purple buildings of Los Angeles, where existential questions as to why he was still alive, for punishment or a chance at redemption or endurance, had come into a soft acceptance of simple settlement on the nights he had taken to sitting while the dusk dawn of the purple setting of the city had come.

Bojack let a twitch pull up on the left side of his lip, not having either the energy nor the focus to offer a comeback or even a comment. He leaned forward beside her as he allowed his body to sink deeply against the edge of the seat, turning his head backward as his mane grazed against the side of the leather while he sunk back. He could feel the taste of the cigarette on his lips and the teasing of the fresh air that surrounded him of the smokey tinted nights he had spent passed out and too high to process-and even less to care, and it was in an odd bewildered contrast to the fresh memories of what was a fulfilling and spiritual life of his daughter as she was curled beside him now, the richness of how he loved her having turned every previous moment of unbearable neurotic meaninglessness into something rich and full, and not for the countless time wad Bojack overtaken by the true emotion of what it felt like to live without love. There was a personal profound truth to Samantha; a profound truth, terribly painful and risky, but with such truth to it that to look away would have been the most pathetic thing he would ever do and a deep betray to himself.

It seemed to hang in the very edge of the spinning freshened air that surrounded him, in the galactic light that spun through the space. He leaned his head backward as he allowed a release through his lips for a moment, though the sensation did little to rest the still thudding sense of his heart against his chest.

He paused as he opened his eyes and allowed the galactic light to continue to swirl through his vision, listening to the mummering of the crowd, of the monotoned narrative-of his daughter and of her blurred curved body eased beside his shoulder. Finally did he turn, though the action felt like it held a weight to it, as he looked Samantha over."What are you doing here? How did you get here?"

That always sharply enthusiastic, reflective emotion executed itself further onto Samantha's lips as her mouth raised into a bigger smile. It seemed as if it reached the almond essence of her eyes, temporary wrought golden in the light of the spinning artificial lights. She gave him a quick laugh, tossing her hair with one hand, and causing a strike of a heat to go through Bojack that held entire world's of memories to go through his mind that, for the sake of the depth of pain of which they may have caused, to think about too deeply in the memories easing in and out of his prepcetion like golden shadows.

"I guess it's the usual between you and I. One of us always doesn't want the other way around. But I'm0not here by choice." He turned as he allowed the poked teeth of her slender and attractive smile to met Bojack's far more troubled and baggy heavied expresion. "You always know how to run away from things that you don't want to, don't you?"

"I do not." Bojack's eyes lowered as he met his daughter's expression; as blurred as reality was, he was somber and in control enough to take ease of that of which was around him; and had been alive for long enough to come to an understanding that there was nothing to existence expect for his own mind's narrative, and of that of which he was sick of allowing to control him. "I don't even know what this is. I came here because I'm aware I'm on my own. That's why I'm laying women."

"What, mom?"

"I don't know what she is. Taking her out to get something nice while I figure my shit out on the side. You're doing a great job at being encouraging. Here or not, you're not helping my case. "

Samantha's eyes flashed.

"You can't not know what mom is while knowing who I am. That's not how this works."

"Yeah?" Bojack's eyebrow raised into that dry, sharp exasperation as he looked her over. "Then why don't you tell me 'how this works', if you're so confident about it."

Samanath took to looking Bojack over for a moment, emotion in her eyes unreadable; then something took on a casual release as she chuckled as she threw her head back against his arms, leaning against the chair. "That's the way. Never get too challenged. God forbid, right?"

"If that were true, I wouldn't bother insulating the idea of talking to you."

Her tongue grazed her cheek, poking it out from her mouth as she pressed her tongue against it; carefree, thoughtful, reminiscent of the bigger details of her simpler days.

"But you are, dad." Her eyes looked over at him. "And I think you know why."

Bojack's eyes winced as he gave her a flare.

"You're not…" He took a breath, seeing the world spin for a moment. "Here." He paused as he blinked, starting again, closing his eyes as he sighed, then turning his dim eyes to her again; somber, concentrated, attempting to be in control in he middle of his high and chaos as much as he ever could be. "You're not here. That's the reason why I can do this. I'm tripped out, but I didn't have my brain taken out of my skull." His cynical and hooded eyes turned back to the screen. "I know that you're just a weird side affect of whatever that nameless woman has been coming up with lately. Obviously."

A chill overcame him when he realized just how true that was; the odd devastation flowed through his body as he felt the surreality of the body tremble in front of him that came along with emotion that could serve to be that powerful. It seemed like a mirage that was half there and yet now, and yet somehow it felt more real than any of the disquiet murmuring that was manifesting from the back of the chairs. He shot her another abrupt glare. "I did mean what I said, by the way. What are you doing here? Even if you were something with a conscious choice, or whether you're not or are, there must be something inside of you that came up with a reason. Or my reason."

"The same reason as what you're here for, I imagine." She popped her eyes she turned to the ceiling, long hair triangle back. "Or maybe it has everything to do with everything you won't admit. It's hard, isn't it? The idea that you can't just trip out from what you naturally keep going towards. Intimacy, sex, the like. Much easier to just continue sabotaging everything and see what comes out of it." She laughed, softly, the sound having genuine fond memories within it. "Mom and you were always coming between the idea of sharing in that past experience and of her loving you and loving you through it, and with you getting jealous if she exhibited the same thing."

"Yeah?"

"Generally the both of you were sharing within it at the same time. The both of you were incredibly good at it." She turned her head up but she looked over Bojack while her eyes glimmered over through the neon light; she looked especially beautiful and tender with the physical embodiment of hope and light and an endless meaning in her that defined reality, and Bojack felt himself overtaken with taking her in again.

"Huh."

"She also said that she didn't have any sense of having any kind of preciousness to anything that could be genuinely taken away from her other than the memory of what it felt like to be loved by you-that everything else was just a quick and superficial and meaningless activity at best. She had no attachment to the real world anymore- or any objects or anybody or anything that could ever use to try to manipulate her and try to get her to be enslaved as part of the world, or doing things she didn't want to do to be able to gain anything. She said she saw it for all the emptiness of what it was now, and she said that she knew that it would ever be enough and didn't matter in her wellbeing, and that completely detaching away from it was freedom."

Her snout turned down, the consideration and shame on her expression made visible from the white spotlight.

"I don't know if I ever got to the point where I could meet her with that. She said that she had times when she felt crazy-she said that she knew you had the same weakness inside of you, but then she said of all the people that ever existed before that have managed to get through life without losing their mind; and especially now that you gave her your strength of seeing each other, that she knew that no matter what kind of games her brain tricked on her or no matter how sick she felt, she'd be able to endure to get through a life just as all before her had from young age to old."

Her head turned up as her curved eyes eased up to the questioning and delicate ones of Bojack, ears lowered while she met his.

"She said that everyone suffered in some way for being disgusted and their own unremarkable humanity; that no one was particularly impressive at the end of the day, and we all judge and punish one another for it. But she said when the two of you were around one another, for a little while, that wasn't true. And with how much the both of you brightened up around one another, and I can remember even from a young age how that felt watching the two of you, I believed."

"You-remember something like that?" Bojack eased his elbow forward as he looked his daughter over, eyes secure in question.

"I don't-no." She paused as her eyes turned down in front of the aimless back of the chair as she stared at it, her voice coming to an abrupt blunt thought while she gazed at the chair. "I mean-Maybe. It comes to me in small waves now and then-the memories. It's like a white fog that comes over me every now and then, a small prodding of a memory of how something was, not unlike the way time comes and goes for someone's perception anyway as time goes on, and it all unwields in front of me for a moment until I can see the full scope of the memory with full clairty like I'm living as a little girl again walking around our house. The small memories like that; they're especially clear. It's like when I hear the first part of some song that's gentle and reminds me of a time in my life when I started to really understand how special it was, what you and mom had, and my own moments of growing up that were especially meaningful or stuck with me. Those soft moments. I remember the way mom held you, with her arm wrapped by your wasit, and you always lenaing beside her with your robe around your body while your head rested on her head and was pulled into her embrace."

Bojack's eyes darted in thought, and though he could vaguely conjure up the image of a small and tentative Samantha leaning in front of the open archway while she watched his stout body, a natural stout and plump air about him as he eased his body beside yours that spoke of content fatherhood and of a settled husband, his mane splayed out from the wakening in the morning, and his previous only virtue being that odd bittersweetness that came along with inner insight of individuality and of how it related to the outside world of personal injustice was now far more rich and expansive with tangible reason to feel good. His eyelids lowered heavily in front of his dry eyes again as he eased his body back beside the leather chair, plush and curved body easing forward while Samantha kept her body curled beside his body, ears lowered, exquisite caring of her expression thoughtful.

"Well, I would make sure that you keep that as a memory." Bojack placed his other hand on his leg, ears flicked back as he leaned his body back on the chair while a dryness overcame his expression. "This woman can't be anything like the one you describe. Unless you are just an extension of a trippy drug trip, in which case, you're the fantasy of someone who I used could be the woman you're telling me I spent my life with."

"Where is she?"

Bojack's bottom eyelids winced in thought. "The woman's..fine. She doesn't even know where I am. Maybe she even got over it and left. I don't know."

A sharp, tired sigh eased out of Samantha's lips, her eyes eased down in thought, and Bojack felt his concerned eyes easing over to her, naturally drawn into her disposition and of the detail of the stories of which she carried.

"Look, I'm going to say it straightforward. I don't feel sorry for you."

His eyes turned, ears flicked."Thanks."

"I don't need to. I know you'll do it as much as possible."

Bojack paused as he thought about her words, but then managed a small chuckle, modest and charmed as his eyes turned down in reflective thought-somehow, doing it with Samantha felt gentle and more of a smoothing sense of understanding of some touch base of unconditional love, rather than the constant abrasive emptiness of that of which Bojack was usually accustomed to.

"You do know me, then."

"I don't believe in the idea of change or of trying to find redemption-especially not through some partner you came here with. Or anybody you ever smashed for the same reason. I know your life with mom-I know me. And whatever this is, I don't think this is it."

"No?"

"And I feel like you know that. It's all going to go down the same pipe dream, right? They're all here and not at the same time-the woman you tag along for the sake of trying to feel what you think they'll give you."

"She calms me," Bojack interjected. He wrapped his arms around his chest, taking it off from where it was eased beside her shoulders, firmly keeping himself closed in as much as he could as he felt heaviness overcome him at the slightest admission of any tangible approval of the reality Samanhta was painting. "As much as I imagine anyone ever would."

"Maybe. But after this? Another sad sop story that she won't want to be associated with. Guarantee it, and I know you do too."

Bojack snapped his eyes at her pointedly. "I thought you said you knew this was mom."

"In my memories, yes. Whatever weird drug you took-yes." Her bottom eyes winced, simialir to Bojack, as she met his hard eyes. "But right now, in this same reality where you just described the same woman I thought was mom as someone you 'couldn't see yourself spending your life with'?"

"Well-"

"Not here. She could leave and give up, just as much here as anywhere. The love that you share does not exist here specifically."

Despite the context of the conversation, something was soothing in him through the painful authenticity of it- he could calm down enough now that although he could still feel that panicked breathing that was caging in his chest and the tension after tension of unfolding through the conversation and the unfolding of the attempt of understanding where there was injustice and where there was simply things as they were, there was strange peace that was overcoming him now that let him know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was hallucinating. His rich, overtly complex imagination was taking him over; and he was only processing what you were inspiring out of the constant turning over and ongoing questions and realities of his mind, whether he meant to or not.

Somehow, that comforted him. There was a promise in those islands of broken mentality where he would find a peace within the broken parts of his sanity that occasionally spew and broke up like a wave, and it left him almost some breathing room to see into himself. Rather than trying to rush himself through denial and manina the way he would have in the context of reality when his mind wasn't playing him down, he felt a comforting grounding in the general surreality of the episode.

Still, he didn't understand it, and he certainly didn't have the stability or patience to figure it out except through means of active aggression. He opened his lips, thought about the after action of what he would say, then closed his lips as his teeth poked in clumsy thought after.

"How much longer do I have to stay here?" He turned as he gazed at Samantha again. "This is the kind of inbetween high trip my brain takes me on where it's almost worth enduring, but not enough to stick around and put up with for a long time. I kind of have other shit I have to do. Whether this woman is significant or not, I should still keep an eye on her."

"That's up to you." Samantha's body was leaned back casually, her eyes turned upward to the ceiling. "It all feels under your control, in this case; whether for better or wose is up to seeing things pan out. But things are the way they are, and the emotional end result will end somewhere eventually, and whether it was the best or the worst decision, the result on a literal level will still come to conclusion."

"Is it?" Bojack's ears flew back, then his aggravated eyes eased down in thought. "My choice, I mean."

"No, it's not."Her voice was loud enough that it overcame the monotoned voice for a moment, shrill but emotionally intelligent and sohciapted and somehow reaching every scope of every fear and scenario of Bojack's experience that had lead to his suffering that had previously felt entirely alone, and he felt something shiver through his body that came through the profound effect of something human and worthwhile. Several cackles dressed the stagnant air of the theatre as the voices and conversation continued to talk, mushing Samantha's laughter and intertwining and melding into it.

"It all comes down to inner peace, dad. Everything we want. It's just that everyone goes about different ways of trying to achieve it, and most is overcomplicated or wrong. But I realized over being your daughter through our fights and conflicts that you always working hard in lives like this without me, not unlike this one, for example, was just you working hard on distractions for the sake of keeping busy when none of it would ever heal the main wound of the fact we weren't with you; whether acting, drugs, hookups. The business made you feel a little content, but mostly it just burned you out, and along with the heaviness of the emptiness of our absence and your grief anyway. Nothing could have changed the core of your misery that we weren't with you; and rather than meaningless distraction, you would have been better off to settle for sulking and grieving and letting it overcome you, since that grief and sense of it was always meant to destroy and follow you with everything you did, anyway. Happiness dosen't come from success, but from fulfilling your emotional and physical needs; everything else is just humanity's allurement towards narcissism. You weren't doing either. You still aren't. And like anyone suffering and struggling person, you feel that."

Bojack's ears lowered, and he raised up a hand to wave off some of the eyes that turned to pierce into him in question when they heard his low rasp of a sigh at Samantha's words. His voice lowered as he turned back to the causal figure beside him, eyes tentative, hands on his knees as his body slouched forward, eyes concerned and conflicted.

"Samantha, It's not up to me. If it was, I wouldn't even be here right now. It's not something that I can control. Do you really think that I would be tripping over myself trying to ruin a perfectly good thing that makes me happy if it was? I have blow, a women who might be good enough to smash a second time, and a really big idea of getting myself out of this place that's occupied by people who aren't good enough for the entertainment industry and what they do for fun. That's it. And you-" He indicated his hand to Samantha; she turned her head to him, though her head kept leaned back in an odd casauilty despite the heaviness he could feel coming from her in waves. "Don't understand the full depth of what loneliness is, what that looks like in what scenario, or how it's not what it seems all things considered. You are a drug hallucination." His eyes lowered into his more typical dry exasperation now as he met her eyes. "So take that into consideration, please, when trying to tell me how to feel about things."

Samnatha closed her eyes as she rolled her head away from Bojack for a moment, absentmindedly scratched the side of her cheek; the action was enough for Bojack to feel a jolt at the compelling comparison, but she had a more sculpted way of going about it; more emotionally controlled. For a moment did she look just as vivid as much as anything Bojack could have experienced in raw reality, her skin just as beautiful in a black and profoundly ethenral way and with a welcomed glow, complimented by an indescribable haunting air in the natural ease of which she moved that was starkly similar to when Bojack had first seen her-the expansive and large surreality to her and the blur of the sides of her body that only came from one who knew how to carry a wisdom in a way Bojack knew couldn't have come from him; he could see parts of yourself in Samanhta, even as he hardly knew you, but she carried that odd innate feeling of a natural motherly insight to life and existence that he had been drawn to even when he had seen you by the side of the street; something turning inside Bojack as he had noticed Samantha's particularly impressive level of belief and enthusiasm for him since the first moment he had spoken to her. Her shining, thick black skin seemed like an extension of the product of Bojack's distracted hands that must have, somehow, formed them at some point in the intertination of the bond and settlement of the beauty of that of which he had shared with you.

He hesitated as he kept his eyes turning over to Samantha; then his eyes turned to the blurriness of the crowd while he looked over to the crowd; and then his tentative eyes turned back to Samantha. He adjusted as he began to unfold his arm again from his chest, his eyes wincing as he turned while he looked Samantha over-and then with a reset, even as his heart clenhced with a tension, he gently kneaded her hands onto the long curls that extended from her shoulders. She didn't tense, but there was a vague sense of stillness from her end, but her already poked smile raised upward into a strange amused and knowing contentment. Bojack felt that familiar sensation of tension leaving his body that he had become more famailir with the more he had been doing the same with you the past few nights, his arms hesitnatley coming to wrap around your body in the middle part of the night when he had seen how curled and small you had been inside of yourself, your legs eased against your chest and your body curled under the sheets, and himself only coming to a grounding once he had leaned forward and allowed his arms to embrace around your body, expression troubled as he rested his cheek on top of yours. Bojack kept his stout fingertips curled agaisnt Samantha's hair as he consciously felt the tension fall, but even as he felt relief in it, the movement of his essence and of his body seemed like two different essences and forces fighting at play all at once.

"Everything is always up to you. You just don't allow yourself to believe it, because the familiar of the description is easier." She shrugged nonchalantly as she raised her body upward a few inches, though not enough to take away from the curling of Bojack's fingers beside her head. "And I guess it's easy-tonight's going to be possibly one of the easiest ways out from giving yourself anything you've ever wanted. Because going into it is too simple. It's unfamiliar. You wouldn't ever want to end up with a result that's the opposite of trouble. What would you do with that? You don't even understand what that means."

Bojack's eyes winced as he looked her over. "What makes you say that?"

She swept one of the large waves of her midnight hair back with a hand, and Bojack felt his mouth go dry as he saw the way her cheeks raised up into a grin against the delicaley of her face, showing off her teeth as they poked in her gentle thought, and not for the more significant time in the past week had Bojack realized what it meant to be innately connected to certain souls for reasons beyond comprehension-and the unlikeliness of ever finding that uniqueness.

"You never did ever want anything to ever be easier for you, dad. It always had to be harder. More complicated. More of a pain for you-everyone.. Because that's what family for you. That's what you know. And maybe it'll eventually take away everything that ever made you feel human, but you got what you wanted, right?"

His eyes lowered as he met her encouraging ones. "And what's that?"

"Pain. You get to feel the familiarity of self pity and pain." Her slender black arm wrapped around her legs. "Mom was always good at explaining these kind of things to me. But-I was also ok at picking it up myself. And anyway, knowing you-" Her eyes lowered as they turned down in thought. "When it comes to you, who knows what's supposed to be simply because it is and was predestined and whether it was your choice-but either way, the end result ends up louder than anything."

Boajck's ears lowered halfway. The black that surged through him was tangible and demanding.

"You don't-know what I want, Samantha."

Samantha's eyes turned to dote on him. They glinted against the edge of the surreality of the starry space, adding onto the life in them; with the drugs kicked in, she was beginning to seem more real than that of which made up the mundanity of the indifference of the people that surrounded him. Boajck turned his head away from her as he grazed his hands against the edge of the chair-it was a pariculalry well off grounding technique, but more than anything else was it a desperate reminder that he, at least in some physical degree, was still in control.

"What I do know is that I feel like I took a hit of a drug that I need to make sure dosen't stop me from having a run away homeless woman tripping over her feet if I don't stay in line. Hallucinations aren't as strong as long as you're practiced in self awareness."

He didn't believe the words himself as he spoke them; it felt like punching something that was as unforeseeable and as impenetrable as shadow. He opened his mouth to speak again, but felt the way the words died on his lips, feeling as if to speak anything more would prove to himself a truth that was far from what he wanted to know, as if it would be used as a weapon against him to speak it. He blinked, seeing the mirage of the edge of the space of the stark black skin jar in his vision for a moment; it was there and then wasn't, Samantha's midnight tinted skin and black hair striking from the side of her torso, starting to blur with the rest of the space of the surrounding twisted spotlight that continued to dance around the edge of the black walls of the theater.

Bojack began to get himself up; at least, he thought he did, though in the midst of his disorientation he was hardly aware of much except for the dark and stark demanding feeling against his throat, the surreality of his vision that made him feel as if he had already taken a hit of the harder part of being as out of touch as he was. He tried to find a light reassurance at the concept, but he felt his amusement dying in the edge of the black and swiling air that surrounded him. His eyes winced in their disortentation, his hand coming to rest beside his snout as he gave a rasped and troubled breath as he began to ease his plush body upward.

He began to walk his way the down the aisle, keeping his hands gripped over on the side of his own suit as he made his way and stumbled down the closed in aisle and down the space of the hallway, pressing his hand against each passing chair as he made his way to the entrance. "I'll be with you! I don't know much about it, but I will be, dad."

He briefly heard that familiared flowered and amusement tinted voice called out to him; Samantha's voice, bittersweet and trialing in the essence of its simplicity and the thrill of the tone of her sophisticated tone as it eased into the air, seeming echoed, in a sense, to a degree Bojack knew was only relevant to himself. "And I only say that because I know you'll crumble under anything else I say. You took my voice away, just like you wanted."

Bojack turned, one hand leaning against the chair as he turned to gaze at the fleeting colors that was fleeting around the atmosphere.

"You know that's not true. I didn't take away anything from you. I didn't take anything away from anybody. I wouldn't even know how."

Samantha's ears flicked up.

"How do you know for sure?"

"I just-"

He tried his best to keep going, but he himself falling down as he knees hit the floor under him while he felt another wave of helplessness front the drugs snap over him. He let out an awkward grunt as he felt the force of it jolt through his body.

"Goddammit-"

He tried his best to ignore the ringing of the pain that was ringing in his senses. He let out a breath as he grazed his hands against the dity side of the leather chair of the museum that was now sitting on the outskirts of the asile, trying to fight the foggy and broken disparagement that clouded his mind. He tried to catch his breath as he felt the tentative exhaustion and disorientation easing out of his senses for a moment, his eyes winced as his hands readjusted and gripped beside the chair. The curve of his plush stomach was heaving, his body stumped forward as his ears lowered as he felt his voice reduced to its tentative desperation and the purity of it in the middle of his helplessness.

"How do you know all this?" He took a few moments to catch his breath again, breathing heavily as he caught a slight hitch in his pants; as painful as it was to feel his body reacting to the overpowering wave of the drug and its effects, and his emotions feeling as if they were clouding over his senses, he just as well felt a sense of something true to the deepest core of himself that made him feel alive; as if the pain was leading him to the truest core of who he was, and there was something about that that was relentlessly addicting. He snapped his head up through the hallway of the small theatre chairs as his eyes winced while his expression snapped over through the theatre chairs, breathing heavily, and through his mouth and the wince of his teeth he muttered; "Samantha?"

He gazed up as he tried to see the same place where Samanhta had been a second before, but the only thing that was left was the dust theatrical chairs, the large screen given away to a black screen in front of the end of the film as the program ended. He felt his disorientation overcame him again, fuzzy and demeaning against his mind as the sharp ringing increased. His palm came to rest beside his snout again as he began to feel the swaying of the atmosphere increase. As much as Bojack had struggled with his depression in the past of being unable to see existence as the same mundane activity over to the next with nothing to scratch that inch of wanting to believe there was something more to fulfill where that spiritual greiving and void of craving was, he didn't feel that way at all with Samantha, nor had he with you. Where with most people it was either a boring draining trasndcation that left him with more issues and more empty than he had been when he had found them, or a stranger who's story he didn't know who resolved to nothing due to being unknown-as most people unconsidered in life were unless they found the ways to be known- he felt a narrative of a natural rhythm with both you and Samantha in kind-and somewhere within that knowing, he felt a deep sense of his other daughter; the dewey and bright eyed girl with tan skin that had haunted his dreams from time to time, the richness of the endurance of love deep enough that it had overcome any othe rsense of shame or judgemnt that could have come with it.

The ringing increased. It was getting to the point where it was all he could hear, and even more so all he could process, like a wave of unforgiving distraction overcoming him. He let out a small rasped breath as he lifted up his body from the aisle now entirely, walls swaying, thrusting his body up as much as he could despite the increased disorientation. His hands were gripped onto his ears as he closed his eyes, expression treamoring as he snapped his head downward to try and prevent the swaying of the walls and the ringing of his senses.

"Bojack. I was looking for you."

On instinct did he lifted up his eyes as he felt a dryness overcome his mouth while he found his eyes looking up at you, eyes dilated and his hands easing away from his ears as his pupils darted around the atmosphere frantically in that lost and panicked fashion. Your yes were full of a concern he knew all too well as his heavy breathing conuited to pour out of his lips, troubeld, deeply toned, and panting. His hand grazed the side of his clothes as he gripped on the side of his suit for the sake of trying to reground himself, his troubled eyes darting up to you as he saw your body rushing beside him. He tried to collect himself as he saw you rushing beside him, his pupils dilated as he took another breath to try and reset, swallowing as he eased his body upright as much as he could manage, breathing heavily.

"Not the charmed date you thought you were promised, is it?"

" I was wondering where you were."

He felt you kneel down as you reached out and pressed a hand against the one that rested against his hip; evidently, as much as Bojack was trying to keep himself standing upright, his body kept cracking under the weight of his sickly emotional panic.

"Well, here I am." His eyelids lowered into that ass type of way whenever he had given up on any dignity for the time being, still breathing heavily as he gave an abrupt breath again and met your eyes as you kneeled down beside him. "Right front and center. Ready for the playoffs of worse place to be. Seem to be ok at winning that one."

"What's wrong?"

Your voice was so soft, sweetened in a way he felt he didn't deserve, but for the time being he couldn't be bothered to worry too much about what he deserved. He could only worry about what he needed, and in the midst of his broken mental chaos and the panicked black disoriented space in his vision, he knew he needed whatever unexplainable and hardly resitisable relief he had found in the nights where there had been nothing but intimate kisses, softened sheets, warm skin and bad jokes that kept the both of you company from the past few months. Had it been a little less special, it would have been easier for date you; as it had been, it had been just special enough that he couldn't stand to acknowledge it. It was too pure, too welcoming, too distant from what he was used to. He grunted as the weight of his body pressed against your skin. His weight pressed comfortingly against your body, ears lowered, patheitc age and wear and the simcplity of his needs dressed around his expression as he leaned his body beside your embrace.

"Let me start on writing the grocery list on how to answer that question. Then I'll let you know."

"Take it easy.". Your hand threaded through the hairs of his mane, and he twisted as he turned further into your chest.

"I'll see what I can do about that, sure." He turned as he lifted his eyes upward to yours through the puffiness of his eyes, a desperation stating to possess in him that left very little room for anything else but that almost animalistic desire for him to feel that comfort you gave him-too powerful for him not be afraid of it, and yet too much of a miracle for him to not want to fall further into it.

He leaned forward as he crashed his lips against yours, wanting to feel the real sense of your lips against the side of his own. His ears turned fully back as he felt the soft recpepticaiton of your lips as it pressed against his, warm and motherly, gentle and with consideration and rythmcially clearing his headspace with the feel of your touch. He wanted to feel, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the comfort of your presence was till here, that you hadn't become some distant and far gone mirage of that sharpened and abandoned disillusionment that followed everything else he pursued-or attempted to.

"Bojack-"

"Sh, sh. Please." Bojack's lips mumbled beside yous; his voice was sombr, graceful in his insistence as his tone eased beside your lip. "I want to know you. You want to know me. This is nice. I don't need any other complication than this" He paused as he pulled away, waiting for you to respond, teeth poked, the occasional husked breath leaving his mouth. The only answer you gave was another furious push against his lip after a soft take in of his conflctec expession, to which he felt his lips raise upward accordingly.

He kept his hands gripped over on the side of your skin as he continued to grae his palm against you with a deepend intensity.

"Oh-Oh-" Bojack gave a timid breath as he pulled his mouth away from your lip, the purity that came along with the odd purity of his shyness easing him over as your mouth pressed from his for a moment. His teeth poked as he gave you a pure smooth look from his expression that came along with his adorable and tender apology, his teeth poked from his lip while that tentative humble human doubt eased across your eyes. His pupils looked across yours in a tentative and panicked question, and your hand wrapped beside the curve of his cheek while fingertips eased beside his skin. He gave an abrupt breath, tender and smoothing in panic, and there was a purity of essence to the way he felt your hand cradle his cheek while you eased him forward.

"We're fine." You heard Bojack give his heavy and tentative breath as he eased his lips beside yours, giving a soft timid noise of his lip, and with his gentle eyes guidning to yours did he lean forward and allow the confidence of himself, drenched in desperation and beiwlderent, to lean forward as he gave another tense breath, closing his eyes as his mouth found yours again.

"There we go. That'll do it."

His voice took on that charming charismatic smoothing tone again as he felt the heat of your lips smooth and guide against his with a deeper insistence. He took a loaded breath as he continued to allow his lips to dress against yours, turning his head towards the side as your hands squeezed with an intense and love stricken insistence against his curves and the plush of the curve of his body with desperation in a way that was almost demanding. Bojack continued to let out the low hums of his breath of contentment as he eased his body back to the chair behind you both, and your body sunk down and lowered towards his as your kept your arm guidning around his waist while you slunk down with him against the chair. The soft, low mumbles and grunts of Bojack continued while he eased his breath against your mouth. The movie started again, flashing as it grazed against the edge of the walls. The monotoned, deep set voice started booming again.

"Welcome to the galactic space and immersive experience of the stars. There will be a momentary explanation for every passing section."

Bojack smirked against your slips, though it was painfully timid. He was crossing between confidence and lack of it-though he could sense the rhythm of your confidence that you were sharing together in terms of the weary kife you had taken of realizing this was it; this was what made life and its emptiness worth having.

""Check this guy out," he whispered against your slips. "Sounds like a robot talking about the stars." He paused as he pulled from you, teeth poked now in a teasing grin, eyebrows raised up as his body was slouched beside the chair, round stomach poked up as he offered you a teasing, endearing clumsy smile. "How much do you think they paid him to care about this?"

"Don't be mean."

"I've met the guy. Douche who lives in a dump."

"Is he?"

"I saw his name on the credits." His eyes lowered as he eased his arm beside his stomach as he gave a shrug. "He was someone who worked on the narration for this television series I did once. Total douche in the sense that he was always worried about seeing people as products-himself like one. He would get so caught up in trying to mold people around to what his version or idea of success was and trying to climb these people out of these holes they were in so they wouldn't have to suffering being abused as nobodies forever." His eyes dimmed further in thought. "He was right. But it was how he carried it that I hate-this cynical, terrible guy who embodied letting the world control him instead of doing it on his own.I mean, it takes one to know one, I know, but-he always acted like it was preferred. I never did. I just always thought there was no choice." His hand lifted from his forehead as he winced and shook his head while gazing in front of him with a distant consideration, shaking his head tightly. "Terrible things just happen, and then keep happening, and there's no reason for it, and there's nothing to do but keep taking it. That waas the way it always seemed to me."

His voice was somber, emotionally intelligent, consideratie as he spoke in ways you knew was usually deprived from most-the rich inner emotional life of Bojack was one you were being shown time and time again. He paused as he pulled from you. The next words felt heavy laden as he spoke them, each one heavied with offer of something that he wasn't sure he understood. "Let me protect you. From people like that." His expression pouted, though it was mainly pure in his soft ease of his thought as he turned his eyes tenaitelvy over your body; shy, oddly noble in how authentic his uncertainty was. "Please." His bottom eyes winced again in desperation, as someone self aware enough that he knew he was overstepping his boundaries; at least as far as he prceieved it.

You pulled away a few inches. "What?"

"Please. I'm tired of fighting this. Or whatever it is that makes this…tolerable. I'm tired of pretending like this isn't all there is, or like this isn't some pathetic, small life, and any little endearing that I can have left isn't going to leave as unrewarded as much as anything else like it never happened; that life dosen't reward virtue or hard work, good people, good intentions or love-it all passes into nothing. The only value it has is to help the people who carry it. Whatever made me pick up my attention to you when I would have rather had been left alone in any other circumstance. It's-something. I don't know what, but I feel it. Some inherit emotional rytham.' He closed his eyes, shaking his had as he pressed his hand on his face. "I'm sorry."

Your head turned over your shoulder as you watched a couple pass by where your hips were pressed beside Bojack and the plush curve of his stomach. Your eyes turned down as you eased your head back to him, lifting up your eyes in small enticing encouragement as your hand reached out and pressed beside his cheek; his teeth were still poking, he gave a soft breath, his worried eyes eased into yours and though his stout body curled against your hips. Though his body was molded in such a way that he was the extension of someone who harbored immaturity that had lead to a robust body, he had that grace on his features that suggested someone who was molded into virtue as someone who was rewarded in some way as to how they felt from the character strengths they carried rather than negativity or complacent indulgence; your body the harrowing opposite of starvation and a lack of upholding a mundane life; but the both of you held virtue, resounding warm intimacy in how a pure and enduring heart melded into pure enduring purity as much as someone could in humanity, and the grace that came along with holding virtue rather than indulgence.

"Keep going." Your eyes flashed across Bojack as you gave him a small nod. The acknowledgement that was usually so deprived in reality for the living outside of the quick paced art people made for the sake of feeling they did something was fully present in one another; the cradling of meaning where there was the impossible empty void before.

His ears perked up lightly. "Yeah?"

"I feel it, too."

"It's just-" Bojack's eyes turned down, breath sighing lightly in thought. He lifted his hand in a light gesture. "You don't drive me crazy. Not compared to other people. It's like I can almost get myself to actually-ground myself with I'm scared to know what that even means or what that could lead to." His timid eyes gazed up to you, expression timid and humbly clumsy and insecure. "But I don't think I have a choice this time."

"I don't either." You pulled away, though his hands subconsciously gripped against his palms as he gazed at you with his ears lowering as he gazed at you in soft question. "I don't have much of a choice at all-in anything."

"Right." Bojack's eyelids lowered as he looked you over; part in pity, part in a genuine sense of a devastation n that he shared with you see you as one of the countless people made and born as a misfortunate existence as a result from a misfortunate life."Because of the homeless thing."

"If I'm lucky, I just go through my suffering the way I have to and trust that my mindset and emotions will change eventually."

"And-do they?" Bojack's eyes were empty, but his tone was full of a gentle curious consideration; it dressed how he sounded well.

Your eyes searched his, glinted against the starry space as it reflected against the same eyes he had doubled himself over into pleasure only a few nights before; and it hadn't felt comical, or like a joke, or something quick fleeting and superficial. It had felt depthful, hopeful; something being built because of something he had, rather than complacent acceptance of his insecurity while the world passed through him.

"Something pulled through."

"Right." Bojack closed his eyes as he pressed his fingers beside his snout, shaking it lightly in understanding, though he couldn't hide the existential exhaustion from his end when it came to something he harbored-and something about how he was responding to that was constantly being hit around with his disappointment in how he was trying to understand you through constant erratic human flaw and emotion from their own specific unseen part of the world. "You wouldn't be here, then. Having a conversation as aimless as this." He took his hand away as his dry eyes met yours; human and endearing in how you could recognize the amount of pain they harbored from inherently inhuman circumstances.

"I'm not well, Bojack."

"I know."

"I don't know if I will ever be well. I think I am who I am at this point, and more than likely I'll either stay the same, or keep getting sicker as I get older. But this is as it is."

Bojack's eyes gazed at you tentatively. "But?"

"But I do want to be able to try. To meet you as you are-Where you're at. Maybe that's a better way to put it."

His felt his teeth graze against his lip in thought as his teeth kept poked out, mouth askew in overwhelmed thought as his baggy and black eyes looked between yours; and there was an admirable amount of emotional intelligence between you. When you opened your mouth to say something else from the foggy uncertain extent of your own undecided headspace, he turned away instinctively, ears lowered as his bottom puffy eyed winced, as if it was better to not look into whatever was searching in your eyes. Whatever it was, he was sure it was true he would have rathered have turned away from.

"No, you're right. I can't protect you. I can't even get myself out of bed in the morning without tripping over myself-and on a deeper level, it takes almost no one to look at me and see how stupid I am when it comes to keeping meaning with me. I'm not the kind of person who draws meaning, who is important outside of superficial bullshit with other people."

"That's not what I meant-"

"It's true, whether you say it is or not. This was stupid. Getting attached to you was…" He grazed his hand against his neck, his eyes winced down in a boyish uncertainty as he turned his eyes down in thought, endearingly bewildered. "A dumb thing to do."

Your head turned down in thought, giving a slight nod in thought; there was a heaviness to the action as you started at his slouched body for a moment.

"Well." Your eyes turned back up to meet his. "My entire life dosen't have much to be said for anything being destroyed or full of contempt."

"No. Don't say that." His aged eyes buried into a hollowed chubby face turned away as he looked away from you. "Don't drag yourself down with me. You're too good for that."

There was some slight memory that was polluting his mind that came into the surrounding space as the silence spilled through Bojack's abrupt and blunt way of cutting you off. The both of you were kneeling by the chair now, intertwined with bodies and legs entangled into your heated intimacy, and he could hear some of the crowd starting to become interrupted in their distracted chattering as they turned their heads to look at the both of you the few times their attention came away from their quick chatter. He found that even he didn't care about that right now-there was a layer of detachment from the reality that surrounded him, and for the first time was the dissociation not a punishment, but rather a strange call of freedom; of being untethered to the rules of what made up the understandable rules of happiness and what didn't.

He grazed his hands away from you entirely, finding himself breathless as he felt an increasing sense of desperation to escape the pounding of black caution. The sounds of the talk of the people around Bojack began to ease into a stinging blur, their voices crowding into the overwhelming overhead of the booming narrative voice, the sounds all swaying together into a gradual ringing of disoriented dissociation and bewilderment that began to overcome the majority of Bojack's perception as he felt himself give quick haunted breaths, attempting to keep that overtly familiar panic down.

"Bojack." Bojack's panicked, dialed eyes snapped over to you as he gazed at you in panic that was fully painting across his air, whether he meant for it to or not. "Stay with me."

Bojack's breath panted, eyes small and dilated as his words came out in that breathy panicked uncerintly of his graceful unknowing; "This is something that will lead us both to regret, won't it? This is going to take us both somewhere terrible-"

"I'm already there. And so are you. All we can do now is keep going forward."

"-But-no. You don't know what it's like until it's too late for you to get what you're asking for. This dosen't feel right-it never does."

His faltered expression, made almost darkly handsome by the rest of the edge of the tinted space of glowing ancient human thread of long term suffering and of a timid heart attempting to have the strength to cradle it, was enough for him to seem even more deeply conflicted in a mood that otherwise swore for stability that he wanted to give you; but the cracks of already broken human nature and physcology and his own black wieght of a life were peering out.

It was hard for him to face the vulnerability, but he dared to allow himself to look into your eyes; motherly and having the depth of partnership at the same time, as you continued to speak his name even as he felt the ringing of his senses and the soft spoken nature of his name seeming to falter under the sense of ringing and drowning. He found, much to his layered surprise, no judgment of your eyes; nothing that showed off any need for disgust or judgment like the way he would have suspected, or the way he had experienced with every countless partner he had slept with before the extent of his broken insecurity and bumbling human flaws; where emotional vulnerability was often only met with a detached expression, a look of a hardened distance, or, in the worst circumstances, some need that they had to take him apart for everything he was worth and to expose him from the inside out until his entertainment and the extent to which he had made them feel good was extensively exhausted.

Every expression of every fame ridden and polluted woman would scream at him exactly what was wrong with him; usually unspoken more than directly spoken, to what they perceived who he was, and it had left very little, if any, time for him to breath outside of it, and an eleven deeper regret always followed whatever confessions he had spoken to them knowing that the end result was a black numb of a confirmation of a horrible character to lead to a terrible life. Insecurity had borne insecurity, vulnerability had been taught to him to be a weapon, and as a result he was emotionally crippled in more ways than one.

And yet, he felt some odd need to fight it this time; to push for something other than stagnant negativity. He had come to learn throughout his life that there had never been anything wrong with him or anyone else; just a lack of experience to realize that life didn't have much to offer, and humanity loathed that, so they had punished the hatred onto unremarkable youths and fragile broken adults like him who would take the narrative and accept that it was them; not existence, not humanity's inherent depression with existence. But he had born that narrative to the point where his actions had fit the role; and the role he played was far too human in response to the new one that was being hinted a thim now.

He heard his name called from you with another soft spoken word under the blur of the sensation he had of drowning as his eyes continued to dilate in panic while he tried to collect himself. His breath gave another somber uneven hitch; lost, aimless, panicked. But he felt the flying of his sickly uncertainty met into yours, and he felt a grounding there;

in your galaxy ridden eyes there was a look of a profound rich grace that swore against his own rejection, the emotional discernment of the way you looked into him grounding him away from his black panic and the constant nuanced ways his mind was manipulated.

He felt something shift as he gazed into your expression, somehow knowing he was safe there. A glow of unusually confident want overcame him- powerful enough that he knew he had never quite felt it in the way it overpowered him now, succumbing him to the point where he felt it was some foreign intruder from what had otherwise been a wall successful enough that even he had forgotten it was built there. A strange thing he had never thought would possess him overcame the way he was feeling it now; the simplistic but utterly undeniable sense of appreciation. For the first time, he dared to believe one thing; he was being taken cared of, and the source was as life changing and enticing as much as he had been always been terrified to believe.

"I love you."

The words came out with a certain flow of natural confession that left with as much of an ease as a breath,-easeir, even. The usual tinted fight and embarrassment that would have followed was instead met by a sheer understanding that the confession simply what it was; it had, frankly, left him no choice but to speak it, if only for how rich it was in him. The sensation had slipped out like water, easy and smooth, and leaving no room for his usual childish and handicapped discomfort. Your hips eased back beside his thighs, eyes turning into rich emotion; if it hadn't been enough for him to read the life inside of them enough as it was in the detailed life that made someone like you that he felt he had been meant to read, it was made tenfold from the reflection of the blue galactic light flashing in your eyes, of the grounding and inherent emotional wisdom he felt looking into them that was making him realize the full resolve of quality he felt looking at them in contrast to the emptiness that surrounded him. He gave a dry cough as he eased his body upward, eyes winced as ears lowered as he gave a dry cracked cough; partly to recenter him into the feeling of genuine truth in contrast to the noise surrounding him; loud, but superficial and saying nothing, and leaving him just as dead as when he had come to consume them.

"I know I don't always show it the way that I should. But I do. As much as I can make sense of it." He looked half into you, then eyes darted half away as he turned to the ground in broken thought. "I know inviting you over to crash isn't the premises of what people consider love. But whatever it is, it feels like it." His fingers caressed the side of his cigarette stained palm, fingertips frantically sccratching. "To me."

The overhead voice boomed, interrupting the incomprehensible disquiet between you both. Bojck's head lifted up as he turned to the ceiling, mouth askew and opened in a twisted sudden interruption, his entire expression carrying a deeply interwoven detail of guilt as he gave a hitch of a breath.

The presentation will restart in ten seconds. Make sure that you are able to be seated. Do not exit or sit in front of the aisle. If you need anything, make sure that you have your ticket on hand. When you leave, you will be unable to reenter during the duration of the presentation.

"Are you okay?"

If that was the only thing that you spoke for the rest of the night, it would have been enough for him. The question was spoken as a simple, soft whisper as you gazed at him with eyes that were tender enough that he wouldn't believed they were aimed at him, had it not been for the undeniable way you were sitting in front of him now, eyes entirely focused against his wincing and pain ridden ones as he snapped his head back over to you.

"Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I"m-here. I'm here, and everything is simple and everything is understandable and there's no reason to feel strange. "He scratched the side of his wrists as he raised his eyes up to the ceiling again, pathetic wince in his eyes as he gave an uncertain rhythm of breath. "Or somewhere close to that?"

You began to inch yourself further to his slouching body as you eased your body beside his embrace; this time more of your own body curling beside his into something grounding for the both of you, rather than sitting on his hips for the sake of making love. He couldn't move, and he was too busy trying his best to focus on the sensations that could be real, as far as his disorneting sense was concerning, which could become blurred for Bojack; especially considering the blue crack he had taken. There wasn't much for him to choose from in the midst of the ring of his ears, as well as the closing of the walls that he could have sworn were surrounding him.

"The most heartbreaking thing in the world is how unlikely it is that you can find someone that not only will understand and share in things similarly with you, but someone you love deeply and feel like home." Your head came to rest beside his chest as you continued to feel how his chest rose against yours in his panic, cheek leaning beside his body as you curled yourself against his arm. "You feel like home to me, Bojack. And it's the kind of home that feels oddly devastating, and I know it's for a reason. I wouldn't be able to stand to leave you at this point for anything-the beauty I've felt would destroy me. And I'm sorry for that from my end."

"What?" Bojack panted out the timid word more than spoke it as his vulnerable eyes eased down to you. "Why?"

Your hand grazed against the edge of the spaces of his fingers, and that was enough to bring a sense of reality back to him enough that he was now aware of the ground under his body-the scratchy and unforgiving carpet. He shook his head with a disorientated grunt as he tried to push himself up, slowly easing himself into a sitting position as he felt his body raise upward to try and take advantage of the moment of clarity; but he felt the room spin again; and though he felt that life ending richness of connection with you that almost felt too rich, as if he had found something too beautiful to feel ti without his heart giving out to lose it, he felt himself breaking out into that loneliness of individuality again that he had long since become convinced everyone held for him inherent sense of separation the universe was bent on; and he felt his body slouch back down again, head snapping back as stout body slouched beside the chair. You spoke his name again, and he felt your palms graze beside his stomach as he breathed heavily, head cracked back.

He felt the black fear overcome him even further when he saw several people that were walking down the aisle, his dilated eyes turned over as he snapped his head over and saw the way that their heads were turned down, the spines cracking out from their backs and crack ridden brown necks and looking as if they were more made from some sort of decay disorientation of disdain more than they were human. His small dilated eyes turned as he watched them as he continued to feel the way that his breath eased out in small shaken broken breaths and fear drenched his eyes in panic as his expression lowered up into an exhaustive disbelief. He watched as several of them, at least three in a row, stumbled their sickly bodies down the aisle, their heads turned down and more so looking as if they were made more of some sort of complete absolute drenched defeat of wood or of sickly skin wretched through a sickly time. Bojack visibly let it a sudden abrupt breath while he joled back when he saw that one of them turned their head upward in his direction, as if to give him square attention, the bones underneath their sickly skin poking under their movement, cracking underneath the stretching of their skin as they looked up to him, eyes nothing but shadow, drenched up into nothing except for a black where eyes and the human noise of mouth should have been, and their mouths open through a cracked frame of what should have been lips, breath pouring out of their mouth each walk of their bare stretched legs cracked up against their skin.

He wanted to do something that he would have normally done to express fear in a lesser circumstance-to be able to do a slight abrupt gentle breath of his own version of fear within his otherwise modest and admirable emotional and small grace of how he carried himself as small and intimately himself in his humanity and humble powerlessness that he wore on his sleeve at the same time, but there was something so black that overcame him as he saw the sickly turn of the head; barely human other than the standing up form of limbs and neck, that all he could do was stare with the dilation of his panicked paralyzed fear.

The creature in front of Bojack continued to stare at him through its broken neck as it looked over at him through those black hollowed eyes while walking through the white and star ridden area at odds with the sucking black despair of its weight, and Bojack only returned it in a way that felt as if it was hardly something consensual, dragged on solely by his weighted fear- until finally the head turned away from him entirely, rotted and disoriented, as it began to crack its rotten leg through the aisle with its three companions following, turning its head down as the two of of its companions begin to follow down the aisle in a turn of what seemed three rotten bodies. Bojack's eyes kept dilated as he felt his curious, black fear and secondhand dispair come over him without interference as his head trailed to watch them, feeling the odd black caution that seemed beyond something fathomable but buried in small universal daily experienced truths as he watched the way they continued to stumble the way down the hallway, silent, but their air leaving a mark on Bojack even as his gaze followed them without consent in his dread. Their bodies disappeared into the extension of what made up the stagnance of the blue light and fog of the illusion of the show that was coming from the overhead spotlight; and the gripping of the black threads of what seemed like a universal breaking of black defeat began to turn over into nonexistence as their bodies disappeared into the passage of the stagnant light.

"You don't need to keep acting like you feel stable if you don't."

He was vaguely aware of your voice speaking in an attempt for direction as he gave an abrupt and awkward grunt, sickly eyes blinking as he snapped his head up from the chair again. Your voice was earnest enough that it jolted him into awareness-and it pushed him into the opposite direction of that which either of you asked for; the messiness of being intermelded, though you hardly seemed to know what that meant, and he knew himself well enough to know he would let it happen. He wanted to run, and it only caused the disoriented fog of his to increase.

"Ok." His voice was somber as he blinked and eased his body forward with a slouched grunt. "You're right. Recentering right now, promptly."

"We're not doing anything that is worthy of being worried about. We were just touching one another-but we can go to the chairs and back to them if you'd like, just enjoy the show. We'll see everything well enough for what the both of us are, good or bad, eventually, no matter what-existence has a tendency to even us all out like that. I'm not in any rush, personally." Your fingertips found their way by his mane, caressing the coarse black hair gently as your head tilted while you looked Bojack over. "I am sorry it feels like this."

"Not your fault. Believe me." Bojack gave another somber and gentle breath, and the wrinkles and wear of his face eased forward as he seemed to be getting sense of grounding from the surrerality now; he took to easing his body up from the chair as he gave a shaken breath, though as he squinted open his eyes, they seemed far less drenched in panic now. "I just needed a moment." He waved his hand dismissively beside you. "Just a lot more flashy than I thought it would be, is all."

"You didn't take anything, did you?"

"What?" Guilt flashed through him as his eyes widened while meeting yours, and then he fell into his usual attempt of a low and dismissive chuckle while he winced at you tentatively. "No. I just feel totally overwhelmed by just how many rich assholes we're surrounded by for this adventure. Even though I'm one of them." He tried his best to sound casual, though his voice was still shaky. His pathetic pout came over his features as he eased away from the chair and leaned further forward with a reset of a breath. Your body began to untangle from his gently as you fell off of him a few inches, giving him the space to sit his body upright. Another uneven breath from his end.

"You don't need to think about what I told you too much if you don't want."

"About what?"

"Saying that thing. The-love thing." His voice was apologetic, low, insecure. "Don't worry about it. I'm just not feeling right tonight. It's all just a part of the romantic experience-whatever that means. And the thing about experiences-they end." He grunted as he raised himself into a sitting position. "Come on. I said something I shouldn't have. It's ok."

Your eyes gazed at his fingertips.

"Please take it," he insisted. "Or I'll feel like an idiot enough that I'll really have to throw a fit."

You hesitated, then smiled lightly as you allowed your hand to press against the spaces of his fingers. He started to raise you up even as his eyes flickered back and forth between your own.

You hesitated, then smiled lightly as you allowed your hand to press against the spaces of his fingers. He started to raise you up even as his eyes flickered back and forth between your own, his palms rested beside your hips as he began to help you up from where the both of you were curled beside the chair, as much as his sickly squinted expression and disorientation could manage. The galactic light flashed beside his expression as he gave a timid breath, and he could sense himself battling his pride at trying to keep himself from feeling a fight that he needed to make this more, that he had to fight the stagance of existence or of the idea that the way he was treating you right now couldn't be even better than as it was; to humble himself into wisdom that this was enough, that existence no matter what it was was inherently enough; his hardest acceptance and constant lesson when fighting that sense of that void that he had seen in the creatures eyes even as they had turned to him. His timid breath and worried expression was only as such in his reaction to them due to his conviction that he hadn't actually seen them; it had been a drug induced psychosis episode, nothing more.

"Are you okay?" The question came out unexpectedly, fluttering out from some part of him that he still wanted to hang on to to give him that that intimacy of consideration, even now. He could still hear that ringing into the side of his ears, but the floor was able to be felt under his feet, at the very least.

"After all that, I don't know what to feel." Your body trembled as you felt yourself lifted upward with Bojack's hands grazing beside your hips. His eyes turned down in consideration, ears lowered as heavy eyelids eased over his expression. He managed a small shrug.

"Yeah. I get that."

Your eyes turned as you looked up at him; the emotion was somber, insightful, disparagingly so, but even more memorably; there was a deeply authentic and motherly glint in your eyes, an extension of something that was his companion as what he needed in a lover, his own specific detriment that was guaranteed impossible to an empty degree that had caged him in his own profound isolation to the point of his own curated insanity that had matured over the years that only someone as reflective and intelligent as Bojack could manage; and the trail of something of an extension of a promise of a rich life beyond your eyes, if only he could allow himself to follow it, if he could listen and behave according to the small inner paths of emotional knowledge and light that was attempting to lead him forth to a future that was the only promise to save him from his detriment.

"You're acting differently tonight. Are you sure you're ok?"

"I'm acting different?" Bojack gave you a raise of his brow. "You have a long textbook of knowledge when it comes to what I am if you think this is different."

"It has only been two weeks. Or less."

Bojack's eyes lowered; there was something inherently crippled in him at the idea that you had been such a finite part of his life; and the terrifying ordeal that he was beginning to believe life was worth living after a lifetime of psychological torment where nothing was enough and death was a crippling incomprehensible fate; two sides of possible misery he walked like a tightrope daily. But now even more horrifying; the idea that he had a life he didn't want to end, and one of which was half over. He felt the room spin a little more, as if a trail of afterthought of his dread, and he abruptly stepped to the side while his eyes widened in a temporarily temperament of his dread as he gave a hitch of his breath, ears flown down.

The action was enough to raise your suspicion; your hand gripped beside Bojack's as your fingertips squeezed beside his, and his gave an abrupt jolt as he flung himself to the side, only catching himself with your tension.

"Did you take something, Bojack?"

Your voice was edged; it had a tension to it that held a weight of only someone who was concerned with Bojack's wellbeing. His expression furrowed as he looked at you with an expression that was half meant to be dismissive and casual, half meant for a nervous smirk as he met your eyes.

"No, it's not because I took anything. It's just trippy in hee. Don't you think?"

He certainly didn't quite know what was real and what wasn't. But with the way he was looking at you now, a real sense of your skin against his , for the first time it all felt more tangible and grounding than how much he wanted his insecurity to end.

"Bojack." Your voice was stern, your eyes hardened as you looked across his conflicted expression.

"What?" His eyes winced in a slight aggression as he met yours. He gave a vague breath, turning his conflicted eyes down that sat with a lovable grace across his aged features as he turned his eyes down in conflicted thought. "It's not as if it's any of your business if I were to, anyway. You're just a woman staying at my house." He kept his eyes turned down in his tentative conflicted thought, and there was a clear sense of shame across his features; but he dispelled any genuine execution of it with a somber tone of; "I think sometimes we both forget that there's nothing special going on here. Just two people trying to smooth themselves from the cynical and unnecessary but ultimately effective abuse of the world. But it's not your job to take care of me." His eyes turned back up to yours, eyelids lowered in a heavy dryness. "Just a checkpoint." His voice somber, shoulders shrugged.

Your eyes eased against his, flickering across his expression with unreadable emotion; and then your eyes turned down, blinking as if trying to uncover a layer of your own weak points of devastated emotion, eyes turned down in emotional thought, and then a simple statement of;"No, you're right." Your eyes turned up back to Bojack's concerned ones as you gave him a small nod. "It's a trippy place. And it's not my job to take care of you."

Guilt laced into Bojack's eyes at the cheapening of the far more intense narratives underneath what the both of you were feeling; but a small smile of gratitude eased up on his lip as he gave you a curt nod; one that almost would have seemed like one of thanks for his permission to cheat you.

"Dumb observation. That's the entire point of the exhibit."

Five minutes until the show starts. Please have a seat immediately.

The stars began to explode behind the screen that was placed behind the both of you, easing out into stark white and implosive blot of small stars while drenching through the area. The sounds of the people surrounding one another began to settle into a more intimate and romantic settlement, unaffected by the potential chaos of the world always falling prey to it, confident in their fuzzy entertainment.

"I seem to be a lot better off than you are," you said, a invitation to discernment dressing your lips. "What is going on with you?"

"You mean more than usual?" He chuckled to shrug off his tension, his fingers still swept into your hand, but he began to readjust as his usual superficial and casual teasing began to take the majorty of his focus as his fingertips slipped out of yours, his hand coming to take its place by the middle of your back as he began tp walk you towards down the hall. A loud, nervous, and defensive laugh left his mouth as he walked towards the entrance.

"Everything is fine. I took you here today because I wanted you to have a good time. And I still what that. I know that it's clear that it couldn't be going more off the mark, and I'm sorey about that."

"It's not." Your head leaned down as you allowed your body to be guided by Bojack's hand resting by the middle aprt of your back as he gazed at you with that dry exhaust that only could have come from someone with an extensive amount of complication and self blame, but his eyebrows stayed quirked up as he watched you walk your way through the hallway and up to where the entrance of the theatre was. At the very least, that was a sign you were putting some extent of genuine want of trust in Bojack-and he would take that and run with it as much as he felt he could allow himself to without destroying himself from maddening loathing and conflict from the inside out.

He went out of the theater, his eyes watching you with that graceful discernment as his eyes trailed across your small form; insufficient and bewildered, insignificant to a fatal degree, and the very definition of undeserving towards the world Bojack had quickly and frantically tried to appease because of his own black fear of his inner conscious of knowing how inherently inhuman the system was and wanting, like all selfish suffering people incapable of genuine good, to be the one acceptance, and yet in its small unfathomable nothingness that Bojack himself would have turned his head up you himself was there an extensive amount of something rich inside of you that drew Bojack in; as if there had been a trade off for all of the suffering you had experienced throughout your life, and no matter how much his superficiality wanted to invalidate it for the sake of his own comfortability, he couldn't deny it.

His hands were pressing almost too thickly against your wrists when the his hand came from where it had slipped outside of the spaces of your fingertips and had instead settled into your palm, and then eventually your wrists, his hand squeezing against your wrist as he felt you tense, and then he released as his teeth poked; but he found himself squeezing again, partly because some part of his felt that he could get away with it with you-that you wanted it as bad as he felt the abrasive need to execute the need-and he could recognize the way he was undoubtedly hurting you-or would be, if he truly let his possession and triggered feelings get the best of him, but there was just enough of a sense of respect that he gave you that slowed him.

His eyes must have given away the lack of control and comfort he had inside of himself despite his best attempt at keeping himself from showing off his high, because as he raised his eyes back out towards the hallway and raised up a hand from the middle part of your bac, blinking in discomfort against the sudden stagance of the light that opened up from the front door as he jolted his arm against it and watched the pool of the even and warm light flood from the museum and up to his eyes, ones of which passed into a sudden squint, he felt himself stumble forward more than he thought he would; even as he tried to keep his graceful footstep for your sake, he could feel the world fall too much to one side, and he tripped forward as he felt his senses failing him as he tripped over the hallway, eyes widening as he clumsy passed his way through the open door. Your head snapped as you watched his clumsy step as he stumbled over his feet and forward, hearing a vague call of his name as you spoke it with that same edge; but this time more as someone who knew their place in his life.

"Oh, goddammit-" His hand grazed the side of his pants as he felt the world spin as his eyes flared with both clumsiness and abrupt foggy fear as his body tripped through the hallway. One hand flew out for the sake of attempting to balance himself, his other that had been gripping your wrist slipping out as he flew forward. His plush body curved forward as he paused while his eyes winced in tentative exhaust as he panted, shoulders rolling as he breathed deep and attempted to catch his grounding.

"Why don't you just sit down?"

Your voice almost sounded somewhat sharp in insistence; but not with anger. There was too much richness, too much familiarity between the both of you, too much of a long thread of a rich and melancholic, long life of suffering ever be anything other than companion to one another; and the both of you understood that. He turned as he took a breath, though it was more of a reset of anticipation, as looked at you through his squinted and bewildered expression as he watched you rush your way beside him. The doors shut behind with a small crash, the sounds of the monotoned voice, the lathered and clumsy superficial fogged people of privilege not worth much to be missed in regards to the quality of their character unless one was to match them in their typical dismissiveness, the galactic light and fog and the memory of the three haunted figures as their bodies had come lumbering out with their void haunted black eyes-an extension of what made up human dread of the long and stretched, impossibly long and tired life of living without love; of the complacency of the void that filled them.

"If you want to." Bojack's eyes closed, ears flown down as his hands gripped beside his knees, giving vague panted breaths as his stout body was curled forward, hands pressed on his knees as he attempted to wave you off with your intense concern while you kneeled down to him. "I'm sorry. I'm not really feeling totally into it right now. I'm not really feeling like I'm here, in general. Kind of impossible to when you feel like your brain is being polluted with all those banging awesome memories of the past."

He wasn't aware of the sentences he was speaking, or the event of trauma of what he was speaking of. In the back of his mind did he see the same memories of the speeding car, his black stained hands on the wheel, felt the black bags under his eyes that had felt and dug so deep during that week of the bender that he had become convinced that he would never have skin that didn't look gray with sickliness, a stomach bloated from his overconsumption, black bags under his eyes and a sense of a surreal sense of being on the edge of the life he knew again. The dancing form of the body of the pale and young body of the dancing carcass of Sarah Lynn beside him, her trailing and eccratic energy-the one that had been a drug in and of itself-and now in front of him as his dilated eyes kept looking around the impasse of the area, the continued feeling of dread of the same erratic and dead eyes that had lost hope in her expression that he could sense around him now; the black of the despair haunting him and tenfold.

He didn't come back to himself fully until you spoke the question.

"Memories, Bojack?"

He blinked rapidly, and though his disposition was beyond what he knew how to handle, he collected himself with a reset of a grimace breath before he spot his usual superficial comeback to try and dissuade the memories; he could remember how there had been a sense of a blue tint over the world when he had been speed driving through the street of the snow and of the white as he had kept the windows open, the both of them impossibly sick; and through that sickness had there been something about reality and the people who harbored it that had been so unfathomably horrible but so consistently true that the physical sickness they had endowed on themselves had felt far too justified, far too much like a response to how things were to not act on it, and in a black and twisted way it felt like a justice to act on their souls' screaming, and they certainly had. He saw a flash of the long and fogged body of a women that had traield through the sky on one of the foggy laden days where there had been nothing but a crumple of drugs and consumption around them; grey and foggy clouds and sky that had drenched across the endless road that had made them feel as if they were the only two people on earth; and what a surprise it had been to feel that way, as if released from the cage that was made by nothing else except for the flaws of others; the purity of a genuine heart uncurropted by the fear of the world the most impossibly rare thing; and his eyes had turned up and over through the car window as he had seen ropes tied against the fold of a large and white form of a woman, her stomach curved with birth, and he remembered a grief overocming him on a personal level that was so profound with its detriment that he had physical felt a sickness coming over him; and then numb, as it was with forms of suffering that had gone far too deep for the mind to allow to feel in its entirety.

"Please. You don't have to make a big thing out of this." Bojack gave a small pant of a breath as he turned over to you with a wince of his eyes, breathing heavily. "I just need a minute. Turns out stars and even their little glare effect has a bigger impact than you would think." He turned his eyes up in thought as he continued to pant lightly. "I would, anyway."

"Is this about something that happened?"

"Oh-you're going to start interrogating me now. Fine. Do you want to get out the old keyboard in the history section? I'm pretty sure that that could be used for crunching numbers of taking account of things that aren't your business."

Bojack instantly felt that black guilt coming over him again, and he saw that motherly look in your eyes lowering in insight for a moment at his mumbled spite; clearly brought aback by his sudden onslaught of emotion. He couldn't bring it in him to apologize with the spaces of the haunted memories flying though his expression; his teeth poked as he closed his eyes and turned his head back down again, expression lowering as he continued to try and catch his breath.

"You're the one that mentioned it. I just want to make sure you're okay."

Some twitch crossed his features as he turned from you.

"I've had people in my life tell me that they just wanted me to be 'ok' before. Turns out a lot of it was just them wanting to dress up some narrative that they could be there for someone that apparently needs to be their kids craft fair project that they can show to what they think is other morally superior people who aren't messed up when they think they're done 'fixing' you."

A pause from your end. Bojack could hear what was the thrill of the swan receptionist from the other side of the hall; her voice piercing through that quiet and pure heaven of a heart Bojack could have sworn existed in the way your eyes dimmed as you took him in; a reminder of the kind of people he could have sworn were the only kinds that genuinely existed.

"I don't believe in fixing anyone." You said it quietly, depth and belief behind the way you spoke it, and Bojack gave another reset of a breath as he closed his worn eyes and shook his head lightly.

"That suggests that you think they need to change for you to love them, in which case you never loved them at all, or ever will. So why waste either of each others' time to begin with? Just find someone you don't' want to 'change.'" He indicated his hand to you lazily. "Although in your case, I know that you have to take whatever little humanity you get, so maybe I', giving you too my credit."

Your eyes closed, and there was a new wall that overcame your expression as your expression tensed in emotion. Your hand came to rub by your face, as if to rub off the exhaust Bojack was giving you. He was enjoying the increased conflict; it was familiar, the disdain he was taking from you, and he knew the means to the end with these patterns.

He smiled bitterly as he turned to the ground. "I've heard that my whole life. Change, Bojack. Change. Do this, do that. Be different. Because I don't think you're ok the way you are, because I'm not, so therefore that must mean you aren't either. But I never asked to be apart of this world. You never asked to be apart of something where there's this hyper consciousness of a system where people have the ability to put you in a goddamn that goes down to relationships, expectations of who 'deserves' love as if that's even a thing, and you-down to where I found you on the side of the street. And I'm sick of molding myself. With the way I see that pain in your eyes all the time, I think you could be honest about how you feel, too."

He heard your step as it echoed against the walls as he finished his words with a cut off breath, turning his head down again as he gave another rasped exhausted hitch of his labor; the drugs were getting to the point where he felt he could vomit, and he knew he had to keep it down and controlled if he wanted to have any genuine footing in hs case; both with that feeling that he could feel that came from you wanting to love him, protect him, take care of him and the place into his life that would come from that; the way you would take him to an entire new model of life of outward healing and expression that took away from deep and buried tormented thought-of having something to lose, and of admitting that he was a sick person; too far gone for happiness or clarity.

"I haven't seen one thing about you that I don't want to know more about."

He turned to you, body turned forward, ears lowered, almost kneeling on the ground now. "Knowing is better than loving. At least then you know how to deal with the person. Like some deals on wheels shit. Except it's even more cheap ,depending on who you're trying to love And believe me, no matter what corner of the world you came from, it takes a lot more than two weeks to see the full enduring quality of what you think you want.."

"Bojack, I am worthless."

"Stop it." His eyes looked at you complicated insult of fight. "I wouldn't take a woman here with me that was."

"You know what I mean. The world has ascribed a sense of worth-and though worth has no inhrient measure of what that means in day to day experience of reality, it does mean that the world won't give me an easy life, or even emotional deceney. The idea of 'worth' is a made up caterfoy to get people to try and place what needs and emotional decney people are ascribed based on status, and though it dosen't affect my default life or ability, I see how people see me and what they want to deny me-every day. So therefore, being perceived as worthless has its day to day suffering, because once you're in that catergory, people act on it; and people deprive you of things that will effect you physically and emotionally."

"So what?" Bojack raised his body beside the all as he gazed at you in conflicted question. "That didn't stop me from taking you in. It's about other people, not you. You don't need to punish yourself for that."

"Bojack-all this to say, I come from the dirtiest grim of the perceived world. I'm from a corner of the world that has decided there's not even anyone to be treated as human. And if you knew the things and people I've met and seen in order to pretend I could be treated as human as the worthy ones for a little while-" Your bottom lip trembled as your turned your head down, bottom lip wretching out in thought as it twisted in confliction emotion. Your head turned up with resolve as you met Bojack's conflicted eyes, questioning as they looked into yours, teeth winced as he looked up at you, body slouched. "There's not as much of a borderline between knowing you and loving you as much as you seem to think. Let me try to show you that."

His lips curled against the edge of the comfort of the idea of a cigarette in his mouth instantly; the small instincts he had physically to respond rather than trying to dig through his emotion. When he had nothing to cling onto, he more often than not became jittered, frustrated, tired-empty but reassured onto the physical.

For the time being, he found himself wanting to cling onto the one thing he promised he never would again; a person. The most unobtainable and unrealistic thing he knew he could hang onto for. His eyes lowered in detached, heavy thought, ears lowered, eyes dilated in thought.

"This whole thing is-a mess." He squinted in thought as his hands gripped his knees. "I'm trying to tell you a joke, and the joke is the idea of me giving you something better than what you had, but can't tell a joke when you can't even find the punchline-and I want to this time. I want to find the punchline where it all comes together as to every tangible reason why I can't take care of you-why it's a bad idea in this simple, blotted line that I can't do anything about." His hands gestured in front of him in his theatrical, disappointed emotional narrative to execute the vast time gone by. "I always had trouble doing that with everyone else, and the inability to was my home. It was always better to just stay on the sidelines and watch everyone else put on their lives, to be worthy of life, while time and time again I kept finding that congested 'punchline' as to every technical reason why I could stay in that stagance sense of home of nothing working out."

"We can leave if you want." The suggestion hung in the air with a hue of heavy hesitancy-yours from wanting to help him, and his from wanting to be helped. Your arms were pressed beside your chest, falling into your helpless victimhood again; your own narrative of complacent comfortability, even if it all only extended to suffering.

"Ah, leaving for the sake of not having to deal with anything else. Cute. Now you're starting to get the idea."

A small smile hitched up on the edge of your lip. "I'd like to start with the story that keeps clouding over your eyes now and then, if nothing else. You said you wanted to bring me here so I could have a good time-but all I want is to bond with you, in any way he can for while we have the time to."

He gave you another slim grin, gently pressing his hand with an insistence against the side of your elbow as you walked forward step by step in the minute softness of your conversation that was a gradual staircase towards intimacy-but it almost seemed as if it was a little bit too forceful, and the pessimistic frown on his handsome features suggested some clear sense of rivalry, even now; and the flashes of his memories of being on drugs mixed with the surreality now seemed overwhelmed by the soft focus of your expression and presence-the edge of something unfathomable and rich on the edge of his every drug induced episode seemed at the forefront of what was in your eyes, and almost a release of that of which he had always known to some extent, but had seldom allowed himself to believe; that there was no right person when it came to life or anything that made anything worth anything, just flawed people neurotic with existence and attempting to pull people into categories, projects, traits, conflictions, competitions to fill the one thing that humanity couldn't stand; meaninglessness.

"We don't have to do this pretentious spiritual questioning shit just because we're sleeping together, ok?" His voice was soft despite his trashy choice words, and the purity of his care that he couldn't help but show executed in his eyes. His fingertips trailed beside your rags as he helped you ease your body down beside him. "I wanted to take you here with me to ease your suffering, at least for a little while. I don't know why, but-" He gave a small shrug, eyes empty and pupils dilated as he gazed in front of himself emptily. "I wanted to."

"The only thing that can give you genuine relief is to do things that revolve around the inevitability of suffering. To find wisdom and meaning in it, to understand it. Anything else is a cheap distraction that will destroy you further later."

Bojack's eyes furrowed into thought, hands on his knees as his back leaned forward; stout, plump, conflicted, lovable.

"Yeah, you're probably right."

I don't know if you're okay." You said the words with a certain kind of new found statement of resistance towards letting him have the last word to his wellbeing or your place in it. Your body leaned against the side of the bland entrance to the galaxy ridden wall as you watched him with eyes that were far too compelling and watchful for his own comfort.

"If I wanted to be poked and prodded, I would've given you that already. I promise. Some things are meant to just be…things. And that's all they need to be."

"If that's what you want, I won't say no." Your fingertips enfolded as you sat yourself beside him now, small fragile body easing beside your chest as you curled your legs beside you-Bojack's eyes turning as he watched you in genuine grounded wonder that in and of itself was rare for anyone with anything in the fast paced garbage of the world-and Bojack had that odd slower purity to him that couldn't be denied.

"Isn't it fun?" Bojack's voice was tender in question, but his lips raised up as he spoke to you gently but with the attempt of talking to you in his only taught love language with recognizable success of quick teasing. He shouldered you lightly. "You and me and smashing and going downtown with a rowdy 'toude and cool girl attitude. All that young people stuff? That's all we need. I think that's all I need to believe in. And I think-and excuse me if this is rude again but regardless-if you really looked through and saw yourself for who you are and where you're at, it's probably what you want, too. What you're capable of responding to. And I don't think we should be ashamed of giving ourselves what we need to with where we're at. We're using what we were given as people, best we can with our emotional handicaps, and as far as being repulsed by ourselves and our failure to use our own ability in full-I'd say we're doing pretty good."

"It's your invitation. Your life." Your eyes turned down, fingers cramped with a tension across your hands. "I know that I'm lucky to even be having it."

"That's not necessarily true." His eyes were dry in consideration, eyelids hooded as he lowered his expression downward. "You get a say too. I'm just-trying to make it as easy for you as I can. Since I gripped you into this hole in the first place." A small shrug, stout body curling forward as he leaned his body into a slouched curve against the bench. "Feels like the only thing that's fair."

"I'll stay as long as you want me to. As much as you can stand." Your eyes turned down to the side, sullenly leaning back, but keeping the small door open for him to follow. "That feels more than fair to me."

He hesitated in his spoken sullen thought, and he let out a hum when you saw you shrink back slightly against his clear disapproval towards the detriment of the situation and the confliction of his emotion. For all his complications, the last thing he wanted for you to hurt; that was as clearly communicated as much as the conflicted guilt and complication made up his mindset and inner torment. But the tenderness was certainly plenty executed; it was in some inherent detriment in regards to his natural tenderness.

"Jesus." His voice was rasped, conflicted and mumbled as he turned his head to the side, body swaying as he eased his cheek to lean beside the top of your head. As blurry as his vision was, as dissociated his perception continued to be right along with his emotions and even more unpredictable intentions, he could certainly follow the trail of the want to follow the profound softness you granted him by following your intimacy.

He pressed his lips to the top of your head, keeping his hands still gripped up against the side of your shoulder with an insistence that was almost too strong-but he could feel how you undoubtedly enjoyed it, in a way that was just as broken as he wa.s How he was both pulling you in and away at the same time, he didn't know; and the need to know was becoming increasingly less drenched with guilt and more drenched with a natural candor of following a natural intuition of what felt good in spite of the black that surrounded him.

He could feel the way he was losing control of trying not to control you; he wanted to keep you by him to a degree intense enough that it wasn't just embarrassment as to why he didn't execute it, but a self awareness towards an unnatural need of possession. His body was trembling as he felt the drugs pass through him, the distraction of what was enticing him to you, accompanied with a certain possession brought on by fear of abandonment-a familiar sensation of combination that he knew all too. He was being introduced to a side of him he didn't want on the four walls that were just as much a reminder of something he didn't want to remember; and of the memories, surreal, blurry, disoriented all at the same time, and somewhere under all that, a sense of surrerality of something indescribable; the way Bojack preferred reality, and the only way he could cope with it.

A black punch killed his chest as he felt your head lean into his touch; his low rasped mumbles and the disorientation of his thought that came from the drugs that made it impossible to doubt his want for intimacy towards you. He heard the shrill laugh of the swan that was coming from the other side of the corner; too close for comfort in regards to his reminder about how beyond this he was dressing this up into the same superficial sense of quick paced rejection later on once the drugs wore off-and an unapologetic reminder of the corner he had pulled himself into. He felt a tremble of a shiver in his body for a moment at the thought of what was ahead, and the muscles on his face treamored in trouble as he gave a heavy breath and eased his body closer to yours. You winced as you felt the way his grip increased a little bit too harshly onto your shoulder as his arms wrapped around you.

The only thing he managed in the middle of the sudden interruption of his panicked spell of pulling you close was the notice of the sound of the breath gritting through his teeth; such a contrast to the way you seemed to have that natural motherly calm in your own demeanor. The laughter of the swan continued, her voice full and loud and confident in a way Bojack had never been able to manage inside of himself with a wholeness to it, having rebuilt herself from the previous interaction she had had earlier without bagging; without being continuously dragged down as time when one with constant guilt and wrecking self doubt; the only long term processing Bojack had even known himself.

"Are you ok?" His voice was somber and considerate as he pulled himself away from you, looking you over with eyes dimmed, grace in his emotional concern and intelligence.

"I feel fine." Your head eased further beside his chest, pulling yourself inward beside him as your legs curled up further to your chest. His palm began to grip away from its hold on your shoulder as it turned into something more of a gentle caress, and his eyes turned up in front of him to the blurry surreal space around him, his eyes empty, dilated and troubled as a dread come over him when he remembered what he had promised the swan. You felt so content curled up beside Bojack, your torso easing beside him into a full contentment, and he could sense the strength of the rhythm of the both of you as you began to become fully bonded into one another while the rest of the fog of the flawed world and ots apathy to the both of you began to melt away into a gradual ease of the richness of focus and life between the both of you, and despite the tint of the subconscious dread haunting him, as Bojack could never wish to have a moment of peace in his erratic and high paced and high end emotion, he felt his desperation of want to stay with you more than anything.

"We have a lot of the party lot here tonight!" The swan's voice pipped up as her voice shrilled, and Bojack felt himself visbilly wince at the sound of her voice gripping him back to reality. His ears flew back, body eased backward as he felt his expression wince. She must have been talking to someone; her voice was thrilled upward into the air in that naturally bubbly and confident way that whole people like her held that was a mystery to someone as dissociated and as empty as much as Bojack was, and he felt as if she were intentionally aggravating him with the way her high pitched voice was slung into the air within her conversation. "Horseman, Barbra Barbra, Piggish Style and other celebrities and well known people similar-all came tonight for the sake of seeing our new exhibit. We think that's something worth bragging about. Especially on opening night. As a matte of fact, I think one of the aforementioned is about to come around the corner right now!'

She seemed like she was calling to Bojack; intentionally triggering him to get himself up and go to her. If she were aware that Bojack was around, she was currently doing it to a full passive aggressive extent. He managed a nighed sigh as he turned his head downward, sound eased in his heavy confliction, palm on his snout.

"Horseman? I hope not the likes of him. He's the kind that trusts the current state of his headspace-that allows the black or the current narrative to be all there is."

A slight thrill of laugh, something nervous, from the swan. "How do you know?"

"You can tell by how impulsive he's been. Clear as day. He doesn't allow himself to see how big and expansive the narrative is; he just allows it to choke him, to believe in whatever is around him instead of seeing each experience as a small building block towards something unheard of that a wise man understands he can't see. People like that-they'll never be free."

A slight amused chuckle from the swan as Bojack heard a plastic bag being placed down on the counter around the corner. Bojack's ears perked up, his eyes darting up into alert energy as he snapped his expression over to where he caught a few low mumbles of the conversation between the man and the swan.

"Wise, of course not." The swan's voice was amused as her tone trailed through the air, and Bojack felt his body leaning forward as his eyes winced while he looked over the corner; he could hear the material of the plastic bag being placed onto the counter, the sound of the drug dealer keeping his vocie low as much as he was able as it was handed, the attempt at lowering the swan's voice as she spoke to him between interaction. "Wise to be ordering something like this speaks for everything it needs. I don't serve people like Horseman because I think they're wise."

The swan's voice was kept lower now, no doubt as a mumbled request from the man to keep them both under guard.

"Why do you do it, then?"

"Same reason as to why everyone does everything once they realize that life is about technicality and not about waiting to be seen for your vision by anyone-which will never happen." The swan gripped her fingertips beside the bag as she pulled it over; Bojack could hear the sound of the bag swaying across the counter, and his ears lowered as he winced, even as he kept his arm around your shoulder; you seemed lost in the extent of holding him that Bojack was aware of your own sickness. "For the sake of keeping my head above the water of the few good that life grants you that's left, even if it's only about money and the things of the like."

The conversation died out from Bojack's preception even as he attempted to keep himself focused on it, the sounds of the man on the other side of the counter benign reduced to a mumbling of his own talk of attempting to keep himself from being heard. Bojack felt his body tense to a significant degree as he heard what sounded like the man's wears of what he had brought for the exchange to start cleaning up, the sound of a case being brought from the front of the counter as he spoke another low word, the sound of clicking that was snapped from the front of the case. Bojack felt his body jolt as his ears lowered as the bottom of his eyes winced further as he heard the case leaving the side of the table.

"Good on you for figuring it out, then. Best of luck."

The swan spoke something else; a high raised pitch of her voice that sounded like herself trying to keep her conversation as well meaning as possible while she tried to keep her loud natural high pitched voice to a lower degree. There was some silence for a long while, the vague sound of shoes waling across the floor as the man muttered a goodbye as much as Bojack was capable of hearing in the middle of the fog that surrounded the monotoned narrative and galactic effects on the other side of the large door.

There was nothing but mundane silence that followed long after, and Bojack closed his eyes as he leaned his body back beside the chair from where he had been leaned forward in tension; his troubled eyes turned back to you as ears lowered, his embrace pulling you closer from where he felt the limpness of your own sickness and the relief that was dressed across your face from finding it in him; there was such a lost aimlessness to you of not being known and the lifetime of scars that had thrusted that on you that Bojack felt a small raise of his lip taking you in; bittersweet and melancholic in his small peace for a moment as much as he could manage before he went into the hell that was his usual cycle going forward of the only way he knew how to process.

Bojack's troubled eyes turned as his expression looked down to where your body was eased beside him; eyes closed and cheek laid beside his chest. That motherly look and hue eased across your expression was enrichened by the leaning of your body across his; the allure of what gave away a sickliness of something inside of you that Bojack was attracted to because you carried it differently than he did; different sore spots for him that were a strength for yours and vice versa, but at its core the same sickliness that caused the core of your bonding with one another. You hadn't so much as even opened your eyes as you had curled beside him; your breath was coming out in a soothing meditation, eyes closed, and cheeks red with their ease of softness. Bojack's expression furrowed down as he looked you over, ears lowered in guilt, and he felt that lifelong humble human pain become all the further as he began to raise himself from your body.

Your body naturally began to twist in its disturbance, and your eyes blinked as your expression instantly turned to where Bojack was starting to life himself from you; Bojack winced as he met your eyes as the red slight sleep of them met his. He offered you the most melancholic and regretful grins as he met your eyes, expression softened into melancholy but a gentle grace of ease of attempt of reassurance, as much as his guilt wretched heart could manage.

"Done already?" You began to collect yourself as you eased your body upright, a maturity despite your clear disgruntlement as you raised your body up from where it had been leaned beside Bojack a moment before, your arms slinging around the side of your cloth as you looked up at him with a blink.

Bojack managed a chuckle that was awkward in execution, but one he hoped would be able to dispel the tension of his awkwardness enough as he met your questioning eyes.

"No. Course not. I'm just-" His eyes turned away in conflict, fingertips scratching beside his neck in quick timid thought."-Going to go out." He flashed you an awkward grin, his nervousness meeting his eyes as he looked back at yours. "For a minute. Just for the sake of clearing my head." He waved his hands in front of him as he shook his head in reassurance in an attempt of casualitty when you kept looking at him with that almost too heavy extent of concern."You can…well, stay here, or you can not." A small shrug, a pout of thought. "Whatever works for you.'

Your eyes searched his for a moment, and he only managed another awkward grin as he met your eyes, teeth not showing this time; small, begging for you to leave well enough alone.

"Are you alright?" You looked sickly, your tone almost too considerate; and Bojack loathed himself for the fact that was anything less than honest.

"Fine! Never better." He began to turn, snapping a finger over to you before walking to the entrance. "Just don't follow me over to the booth. Some shit I have to recheck up on that'll bore you to death."

Your eyes fluttered down, and you pulled your arms further into your embrace, eyes turned down in thought as you spoke a simple; "Alright."

"Great." Bojack played with his wrists, and he began to turn around entirely to make his way to the archway. He paused as he properly made his way to the font of the entrance that would lead to the swan; where he could hear the way she had already drenched herself into her contentment knowing that she must have overheard Bojack talking to you and had used the conversation as context to tell him to come meet her. But he paused before he made his way out of the archway; he turned as he looked to where your rags were dressed beside your body, your head turned forward, looking sickly and sullen; and somehow, he felt he loved you even more for that; the fact that for once, he felt he could be a good and meaningful thing to someone.

His expression was still lowered in worry, but he closed his eyes as he turned his head down and tried to calm the quick pace of his heart. His fingertips kept by his chest in their nervous play as he turned back to you fully, hands easing beside his palms as he walked back to you, heart quick paced and cowardly, disposition shuddering in his fear, but he kneeled in front of you, even as sickly as he was in the eyes, even as his ears kept lowered while he took to meeting your detachment at eye level, a small raise of his lip that was a wretched but well meaning kindness. Your eyes turned up from where it looked as if you had forgotten yourself entirely for a moment and had instead drenched yourself into squeezing your boy das you had swayed back and forth, succumbing to some default black headspace. But your eyes turned up as you felt Bojack's presence, the sickly motherhood of your eyes causing Bojack to forget his own fear entirely as he kneeled beside you with the tenderness on his expression as his palms came to caress your knee to bring you to him, himself an insecure and estranged insecurity, yourself a misplaced sense of nourishment that had nowhere to execute it to where it was congested only for yourself; two puzzle pieces of longing that were desperate to come together.

He caressed his hand against your shoulder as he indicated his way to the balcony side oft he exhibit; down the hall a short way lead to a large stone archway where there was an artificial balcony, and he could see the silhouette of the blue even through the archway of where the projection against the artificial wall in front of the balcony currently was a few feet away.

"Actually-why don't you get over to the balcony? I'm sure you'll love whatever they have over there." He indicated his eyes instantly towards the white sign that lead to the part of the exhibit that consisted of the galaxy that would peek out from the plastic overhang of the decor. "Something artsy type stuff where there's a fantasy type rail you lean your arms on and there's a wall in front of you and it looks like the entire universe is coming over you while a voice narratives." He titled his head as he looked at you with gentle insistence. "Could be fun. Much more involved than sitting in a theater chairs full of those overtly full of themselves champagne asholes. Sounds like a good time to me, as far as seeing fake artificial lights go."

Your eyes flicked across Bojack's there was a look of lack of want in your eyes, a desperation to not be lead forward, and even the smallest movements of your hands gripping beside your clothes was enough to make Bojack's eyes flashed down, and he felt something strike him far from pleasant; he knew you were hesitating because you wanted to stay by him

"Bojack, I don-"

"C'mon." Another shove, one that was insistent enough that it was almost forceful. "Go have fun, chill out, see ya soon. I'll be right outside if you need anything." He winced in that pathetic and tentative uncertain way as you began to ease yourself upward at this insistence, finger raised ina slight attempt to add to his point. "But-I'd prefer it if you didn't. Just for-independent purposes."

"And you're sure this is what you want?" Your red edged eyes, executed only by that certain kind of emotional torment Bojack knew all too well; was blurred in his perception as he watched you finally come to acceptance as you got yourself up; your hands trailed delicately beside Bojack as you let yourself be helped upward, and after some effort from Bojack's end did you manage to stand yourself upright, tripping a few paces, but managing to find your balance. Though Bojack's lowered ears and the conflict on his features were giving away his guilt, and he knew you could read it; and, to an extent, even knew exactly where he was coming from and what he was doing, he tried his best to keep his air as confident as possible as his fingers slipped away from your hands. You had a lifetime of torment in your eyes, and life, being as simple as it was, was simply just torment; just as there could simply be just love and peace; but neither of you knew how to achieve that-not yet, or possibly ever within the practices the both of you had become accustomed to.

"Never better. I promise, doll eyes. I want you to go have some fun and enjoy yourself, and I mean that." His voice was charming and reassuring, kind and insightful as his hands came to ease beside your back. You began to walk forward to the hallway, and though your head turned over your shoulder a few times to try and meet his, it was clear you would take his route. His hands kept beside the middle part of your back as you began to walk to the archway, and when you were walking there fully on your own, he stepped back, fingertips eased beside his wrists as he watched you walk to the archway, until finally you were set on walking your way forward.

He took a breath as he briskly turned on his heel, rushing his way through the galactic hallway as he did so, hands dressing frantically beside his wrists.

He could already feel that ringing beginning to come back into his ears again, and the few moments of relief from it seemed to be leaving just as quickly as it had come. He felt as if he were on some spinning ladle, with very little, if any, relief from the wrecked waves of the multiple farces of which he was facing, and of every possibility that could come out of them. He felt his breath beginning to choke out of his throat as he began to make his way back to front of the ticket booth as he rushed his way around the corner, keeping his hands gripped up against the side of his suit as he slammed his way outward to the front large hallway.

He paused as he saw the same slender swan woman, who turned briefly as she looked over at him, standing with her body upright and behind the counter, the bag currently out of sight, and herself unassuming as much as she had ever been, her fingertips typing by the keyboard, eyes narrow in focus.

"Hey!'

Her eyes glinted as her expression met his own while Bojack continued to pant, rushing his way to her as he ran to her desk. Her head indicated just enough for him to come over, though her expression maintained itself as unimpressed and indifferent as she turned her head back to the keyboard. She was mid interaction between herself and a flirtatious interaction of a particularly fame ridden mouse man beside her. His fingers found hers as she played against his palms for a moment, subconsciously wrecking his hand beside hers and with his eyes dimmed and swaying inflated flirtation. He was saying with his eyes disoriented in that heavy way crack did, and he was taking it open and in stride; as if he could go through with it.

"Are you outwardly giving him cocaine? While at the receptionist desk?" Bojack panted as he walked his way beside her, still panting heavily.

"Hard to tell the difference between a tragic life and a mundane life that had all its desires with just some human insecurity, Bojack. Especially when you're on crack." The swan head snapped her eyes up to the flirting and swaying mouse man beside her, whose face was cracked with a cloudy expansion of drunken indifference as he swayed, teeth poked open. "Shuts them up."

Bojack took another pant, attempting to collect himself. The drugs he had taken, especially with his body mass, were beginning to lessen, though he was just detached enough to deny himself what you brought out of him and to not think about the true long term destruction of it.

"Wish I had your confidence."

"Didn't you come here for crack?" The swan's eyes snapped up at Bojack.

"Well-yes. Technically that's true."

"Then we're on the same page." The swan's eyes were occupied by typing on the keyboard; until something caught her eye, and her disposition changed to something far more stuff, narrowed, judgmental. Disdain came across her features as she eased her body back from the keyboard, her narrow eyes turning to where Bojack felt the thread of rope of concentration go to where her slanted eyes narrowed. Bojack already had an idea of what it was before he even turned, though his tentative instinct snapped over his shoulder as his expression winced painfully, his head turning over to where he looked at the corner of where he had run around a few moments before.

His turning back to you was the answer it gave him, though it felt like it was only half a direction of what he needed in his frantic and disoriented panic. He began to rush his way towards the hallway of where you were walking around the corner, heart pounding in his chest as he made his way through the archway of where your delicate and tentative body, arms crossed against your chest, walked through.

"What are you doing?" Bojack panted, both in emotional troublement and concern as he rushed his way in front of you, vague anger in his eyes; as much as he could manage. "Please go to the exhibit."

"Changed my mind again."

Your head turned up as you met his, arms crossed around your chest as if in a firm resolve but also as an odd bittersweet mode of protection, and he could recognize the hidden disposition on your body now that was given away towards your desire to curve the sting of rejection that Bojack could tell you no doubt perceived from his request for you to leave him alone in this activity.

That soft, egoless smile raised your lips up as you met Bojack's frantic ones, your skin traced by the glow of the galaxy of the blue light that came from the archway to the open galaxy of the balcony behind you. Your eyes turned as you looked Bojack over; his cracks were coming out for everything they were, and he knew it.

"You are impulsive."

"Well-" He gave a shrug as he rolled up his eyes in thought to come up with a response of an answer, attemping to play off the clear tension of his lack of ability to make a decision. "That's how I made it this far. That's how anyone does. You don't make it in Los Angeles unless you're tripping over your feet every three minutes to try and reinvent yourself, believe me. Dysfunctionality works when everyone else is, too."

"Does it?"

"Up to interpretation. If you really wanted to study the textbook of sabotage my life became." His eyelids lowered pointedly as he met yours. "Which this is not, by the way. I feel like I should mention that." He pointed in front of him, as if the theatrics of the gesture would assist him. "This is the one thing I do want to be left alone with right now."

"As opposed to?"

His eyes lowered in exhaust as he met yours-exasperated, empty. "Jesus, I did not know you could be so pushy when I very clearly gave you leave to go do something fun and something akin to what rich people do. You do realize this is a gift-all of this, taking you here, the suggestions?"

A slight shame entered your eyes, and you turned your head down, and managed a vague nod. Bojack was currently feeling too involved in his affliction and addiction to say anything other than to the emotions of your easily triggered guilt be slung in front of you from his words. His impatience was at the forefront now, the promise of the relief of the same usual patterns taking the control.

"I realize that more than you know." You paused as you watched your fingertips and played with them for a silent moment, gazing down at the low place of where they rested in complacency beside your hips-then raised your head up as you met his own tentative and conflicted eyes as you met his complicated wet eyes. "Arlight, then. I'll go take your gift."

Guilt instantly crossed into Bojack as he watched your air readjust entirely; something somber came over you. His teeth poked out as guilt crossed over his features, tensing them as he He reached out of hand to take yours, even as he felt even as he saw the way that you turned as you began to walk your way down through the lights of the illuminated area. His ears perked as he watched you make your way down it-his eyes glamored up into a wet guilt as he began to feel the way that it began to manifest itself into words as he felt a bubble up towards the front of his mouth even as he wanted to go back to his business.

"Dammit, no woman-"

He made his way to the balcony in front of the galaxy that presented itself as the wall of presentation that surrounded the sound system while your pace brought you over to it, Bojakc following. He turned as he raised a hand to the swan woman, managing only a worried abrupt nod as he met her eyes to give her the reassurance he would be back. She turned her head away and turned back to the screen, her palms playing romantically but mostly only teasingly with an edge of superiority with the drunken mouse man's palms that was beside her-Bojack was just a business number to her, after all, as the way he was with most people; as everyone has.

He turned his head upward as his eyes grazed the enormous sign that directed itself up towards the overflow of the 3D auditory dome system presented itself as the main event of the night. Almost unaware of his actions in his panic to protect you did he reach out and ghost his hands around his throat as he tried to stop that choking sensation as much as he was able to while he felt panicked guilt come over him. The looming of the building hardly did him any favors, making the stars seem like a mockery even more than it already seemed they were to him of his trail of tormented memories. The particularly large hallway light up from one section of the room and over towards the other hallway, looming and long, and your own small and delicate form walking through the increasingly more dark but illuminated area, the screen projection passing up the images of quick paced moving stars and stretched out sky to give the sensation that it was passing over you in a three hundred sixty degree angle.

He continued to follow it through as he felt the way that his breathing was squeezing against his throat in a way that seemed far from forgiving. He didn't know how much time had passed, but he could already tell that far too much time had passed-more than it felt like within the muddle of his mind than he wanted for the day; before he even got the material of what he needed in the first place of why he had brought you here to begin with. He walked through the galactic lit stoned hallway, carved into old detail, and shoved his way through the doors into where you disappeared as he followed you on his way over to the fake balcony- one that was inside the museum that make it look as if he was on the edge of the stars of the dome that traced up into the fake fabricated sky, just as he had read about.

(ALL PART BEFORE THIS POSTED ONTO A03)

His eyes were still winced in that tentative squint as he began to follow you through the archway, his expression tentative as he followed you through the archway.

"Hey-" He gave an abrupt timid breath as he followed you through the archway, a whimpered noise leaving his lips. "Hey-take it easy."

"You told me to go to the lights." Your voice trailed over your shoulder as you began to walk your way into the archway, the light and galactic light pouring around you as you walked your way through the overhang of the arch leading to the balcony. "I just wanted to see of there was any chance I could convince you of something more worthwhile first other than jacking yourself off into coke."

Bojack felt an abrupt black go through him of devastated guilt at the your words that had cut through his disposition and demeanor that had been an entire wall constructed to protect you from his habit. His ears flew down further as he felt his teeth poke in guilt as he began to follow you through the front of the archway, his fingertips cramping beside his chubby palms as he followed you over into the heat of the exhibit. Despite the frantic guilt that was leading through him at the words you had spoken that cut straight into the odd pride drenched in shame he had slung in front of himself to protect you from seeing him falling into his old habits, he tried to collect himself into an at least somewhat dignified fashion; for the first time, Bojack felt more concerned towards protecting you more than he was himself for his own embarrassment. That dignified air he carried saved him from his true embarrassment anyway; the slow somber tone of his even voice, the grace of how he carried things with an even grace of somber reflection.

"Look-" Bojakc breathed in a heavy disposition of his shyness as he ran behind you as you made your way over to the balcony. He tried to catch his breath as much as he could, more from panic than genuine labor. "I know that it's probably not glamourous for you to find out that the guy with a very sketchy history to be interested in getting drugs. But I don't it should be too much of a surprise or that you should be taking it with a sense of disappointment."

"Bojack, it's fine."

"No, it's not." His voice was blunt and abrupt as his eyelids lowered in that emotional intelligence he harboed while he rushed and followed you from behind. Your arms crossed beside your torso as you made your way to the balcony; there were a few people leaning beside it as they talked to one another in their low entertainment through the projected lights. 'I know because I've heard plenty of girlfriends say that before and then turn around and show me literally every reason it wasn't."

"I'm not your girlfriend."

"No." Bojack's eyes winced as he turned his eyes up, not so much exasperation as much as it was frustration of thought. "No, you're not. You're right."

"Then don't worry about it." Your body turned as you met Bojack's worried and insistent eyes, though he stepped back slightly as he saw you turn as you eased your head up to look in Bojack's conflicted expression. Your chin lifted up, a new confidence in your voice as you spoke; "Don't worry about it. I'm not a woman that you need to worry about impressing, or molding yourself to, or performing for the sake of emotional survival only to realize as the years go on that you sacrificed your truest messy self for the sake of superficial survival and tolerance with someone who would never have the flexibility of heart and mind to love you. Do and goe to what feels best; do what you feel brings you the closest to your truth."

"No." Bojack's expression furrowed as he watched you with increasing harder eyes. "This dosen't make me 'feel good.' That's not why I'm doing this."

Your eyes switched back and forth between his, your eyes warmth with a navigation that could only be held by an indescribable motherly guide that brought out the most somber and respectful response from his end; an even graceful tone to his voice was entering his voice, open and vulnerable. "Then why?"

"Because-" Bojack took a conflicted breath as he closed his eyes, shaking his head lightly as his palm pressed beside his snout. The true wrinkle and wear on his features was more profound than ever; lovable, unconventional. "Because I don't know what to do with this feeling."

"What? Taking in a homeless woman to use as a way for meaning for a few days, weeks, while you're on drugs to distract from how even that isn't enough, and then leave her on the road? You can't handle that feeling?"

"Not that!" Bojack's voice raised abruptly as he snapped his head to you; but when he saw how you shrunk back under his eyes, he felt something dim inside of his expression as his ears lowered, turning his body back into his somber melancholy. "I don't know what to do about a feeling that, in its own specific way that makes sense only to me, evidently, of that 'thing' people always talked about. That lucky thing that the world is so deprived from-that I was so deprived from-my entire goddamn life-that people think it's sweet when people tell you you're 'lucky' to have it.' That thing that's so rare that people act like its a naive fantasy and a laughable desire for people who don't have it-that thing I had to use as an excuse for a dry detachment and unbelievable detachment and entire rejection of its existence for the sake of keeping my heart from giving out knowing I would never have it."

An emotion that seemed taken aback entered your eyes, and your body titled back for a moment as your eyes turned in thought at the intense of Bojack's words; low as they were, the edge in them was intense and abrupt. Bojack took a breath as he recollected himself, though the slight flare in his eyes didn't lesson as he eased his body back up and straighted, taking a shaken breath as he tried to collect himself.

Your eyes turned in thought; and then your expression turned up to Bojack as he met the conflict of his expression; full of an entire impossible extent of self blame and black, a sickness of a lifetime of emotional neglect and of an endless turn of demons. His eyes darted down as his eyes gave a puffy wince, and his ears flicked back as his insecure wet eyes, caged in an entire niche life of a profound remarkability only to him with small cracks for you to see into in; threaded into his eyes. He looked boyish and insecure, lost and helpless as his eyes eased down.

Your head titled to the side, and your lips pressed together rin thought. Bojack's apologetic eyes turned up to yours as he watched the pain in your face tremor for a moment. Thenguilt and tremor of his apology overcame him as he watched the details of your own more sullen uncertainty of how to respond.

"Are you ok?"

His voice was somber and gentle. Your expression was sullen, wretched over in thought; the emotion in your eyes conflicted; but there was an emotional wisdom in them that must have been part of what had kept you grounded all these years despite everything of what you had gone through., and Bojack could sense and read within you of how it was one of the few things keeping you navigate into understanding now of the wide and indifferent chaos of what had made up life.

"I'll look at the lights." You turned further over to the balcony of where only a few couples rested with their arm eased beside the balcony, talking to one another with their voices mumbled into the quiet talk of their contentment.

"Are you sure?" Bojack raised a fingertip, awkwardly, as he gazed at you with apologetic uncertainty. Your lip raised up into a small knowing, bittersweet, as you heard Bojack's invitation of that natural puritty of a romantic he had under the layers of the performance torment of where he had long since lost himself-and yet that gentle and natural and rare soul he was, unrewarded and even abused by the world, kept coming out now and then; he couldn't help it, it simply was.

"I meant what I said about you being able to do what you want here."

"Yeah. But-"

"We're just borrowing one another's presences, Bojack, and it's ok."

Your eyes blinked softly as you turned back to Bojack, and there was a maturity and an enduring extent of wisdom that seemed in rhythm with human life despite everything that Bojack, as much as many others, had never managed in what was a black extent of loathing and demonic narratives of life and others; as he saw that alluring wisdom, he wanted to go to it more than ever; a genuine need that caused something in his throat to become dry. "Everything we do in life, everything we think we have-just blessings to be borrowed to exert our energy for a little while. No one owns anything, they just interact with things for while they're here. When we die, that's proven. That's why pride is such a ridiculous and foolish thing for someone to fall into." Your eyes eased down in thought, a small raise of your lip as you turned your expression down in thought, seeing nothing for a moment as your eyes seemed lost in an aimless thought. "That's why I'm only glad to be having what you've given me to grant me this extension of our trade for a little while-to make things a little easier for while I'm here. Knowing the suffering that's on the other side of these small blessings, I'm more than grateful." Your eyes turned back up to Bojack, a genuine calm within them. "Go to the swan woman and do what you need to. I know my place-which is finite beyond what i can understand, and I'm grateful for it. I could never be bothered with something beyond this anyway."

'Wow." Bojack curled a hand beside his hip, his expression easing into a cramp of concern as he looked you over. "Is this the kind of thinking that's kept you for falling into an extent of insanity the past few years of your life."

Your lips raised into a further small amused smile, eyes turned down as your palms squeezed your arms, as if in a guide of attempt of reassurance from your end.

"I stopped worrying about how or why anything was. If something comes to me and it makes sense, I go to it."

He let out a hum, but not before his eyes eased into a gentle guide of thought in his troubled purity that had the rare quality of wanting to learn things outside of himself. He gave a breath of a reset, rolled his shoulders, and you eyes turned back up to him as he met your eyes with a dull soft grin; as much as could manage in the middle of his murky fear, ill wrought mind from being apart of the world that had made him as he was.

"Must be nice for you to find some solace in all of this if wisdom comes to you that easily, then."

His voice was genuinely kind, and in the relief of your expression was there your own appreciation to the fact that Bojack was offering you that gentleness to begin with; it felt like it was sweeping through suffocated cracks of the way he was attempting to give you something like that though his murky fog of self to begin with, but from how clearly you appreciated it, he couldn't have imagined regretting the execution of it; the brokenness of your lifestyle that had caused you to be far more appreciative than most made the openness of kindness for Bojack fsr easier, and for one did Bojack understand what flexibility and content with whatever may have happened was.

"Pretty sweet looking. For fake projected lights made by some slave somewhere, anyway. It smells like cheap plastic, stagnant lights, and burning glass. " He walked his way beside you, both hands curled on his hips, giving off that stout and content model of his body as he looked through the projection of the overhang of the lights.

You leaned your body against the edge of his. Bojack neither flinched or turned away; he simply allowed the feeling to pass.

"You always have a charming, nuanced take on everything. I'd like to be able to keep knowing it," you spoke weakly; the contrast of Bojack's stout body and cynical attitude, over bloated with privilege, in contrast to your sickly appreciation for whatever came your way could have never been more evident.

"Just putting it out there." Bojack's voice was blunt in his lack of impression and gratitude from overconsumption and privilege; cynical; and thought undeserving of your pure attention, somehow it endeared you to him further. "Better than to be put in a dumb, fake narrative. What's the point of that." His eyes lowered in dim reflective thought. "Been doing it my entire life."

"There's always a point. Everything turns into the opposite of what it is eventually. Trauma to inward blessing, terrible to good, tragedy from blessing. It takes a long while, but it can happen." Your hand trailed beside Bojack's arm, and though he tensed slightly, the feeling was far too natural, motherly and good for him to even think of flinching away entirely; the attention you were giving him felt like a wide expanse of an entirely new self he would have to go through to even come close to knowing himself or what perspectives he was capable of where previously there had only been suffocating self loathing and the rules of what he deemed possible for him and what not.

"I guess that is one way of looking at it."

"But even harder to believe it. I know.:

Despite the honeyed tone of his voice between blunt words, he was desperately grabbing his mental state around any kind of relief he could find on the pole underneath him while he felt it meet his hands as he walked his way forward. Pills were completely off the table for now-he had decided to throw them away before he had allowed himself to believe any alibi that he should keep them around for the afternoon the second he had seen you walk to him instead og going off to his cheap distraction he was sure you didn't care about him to do anything about. Along with the disorientation of the drugs, there was a sense of his trying to response to what was surrounding him in something emotionally that served to be entirely outside of the realm of his understanding; the result was a resounding sense of a complete unknowing of how to respond, back and forth into tormented muddled conflict of feeling undeserving and of knowing so little of how to cradle that impossibility to reject what you were offering him.

There was no sense of any kind of his usual relief that he would have found in the tension and guilt he felt in that moment-there was no drug, no alcohol that would comfort him in his attempt to turn away from you; nothing except for the dirty box cigarettes that was played with in his pockets and the aftermath of his first high. He felt a particular fuzziness in his mind that was buzzing with the fog of what surrounded his panic. He felt his body shiver slightly as he pressed his elbow on the side of the balcony in front of him, his eyes tenitavely flickering over to you as he felt your hands easy gently beside his arm.

He took a breath as his ears lowered downward and over to the superficial projected depthless expanse under the trail as the galactic light and the overhang of its wide stimulated expansion continued. His shoulders shrunk as the heaviness of his expression gazed upward towards the galaxy of stars that were reflecting on the walls, feeling the memories of seeing hallucinated realities ease in and out from the clouds when he had been more induced in drugs than reality when he had been with Sarah Lynn; that cloud day of where he had turned upward now and then and through blurred disorientation and blackouts and tormented lack of focus had he gradually come to the focus of seeing the stretched fog of a woman easing herself with a gentle guide through the air, white fog blurring through the gray skies of Ohio, and the beauty of it had been lost in his cuddled chaos, bit he had currently remmered the profound overwhelming nature that had come over him taking it in; and for the first time in his life, touched and feeling respected by something beyond status or gain; something deep and soulful, melancholic beyond understanding.

He used to have found them beautiful-the stars, the hallucinated looks of the stretched shapes of woman and the slow flow of woman as they passed through the sky; he had had his occasional episodes in the detailed and rich imagination he harbored, musicals and entire broadways and of entire other narratives besides just from his tormented dreams at night and the natural modes of images of processing he came up with to make up for the empty void of pain where answers should have been.

The galaxy had been apart of Bojack's natural stimulation and small quiet appreciation of the softness of what surrounded him in nature in the graceful quiet of reflection that came out when he was alone; so much to the point that it felt as if it was striking and mocking of his smallness.

Yet as he looked up at them now and reflected on the dark blue with hints of ghastly yellow and white through the speckles of stars as it reflected against the wall, he felt a deeper sadness well in him that only echoed a further heaviness in him. He would have preferred to ignore it- but this time the feeling hit him in such a profound way that he felt as if it would be an insult to even attempt to do the fact. And, the truth was, he felt he wasn't strong or capable enough to do so. He almost felt tempted to enjoy the way he had failed to protect himself tonight, and, therefore, in his own way, you; a concept that previously he wouldn't have cared to protect, but now almost seemed more of a priority than even his own twisted form of comfort.

For Bojack, drowning had previously felt like it was the only thing actually worth paying attention to. It was the only constant, the only consistent promise that he had ever been able to feel; and now he was wretched in his own muddled loathing of knowing the truth of the low quality person he was that he didn't dare currently want to detach from, but the thought of failing into drug use for the afternoon felt as if it would destroy him into black if he were to follow. The loathing couldn't have gotten any deeper-the drenched sense that he was already too far gone into his molded hell, and the acceptance that it was as it was; destruction was his companion, and he would fall into it in the way he had thought was the best conclusion he could accept.

Big stars tonight," he commented, his dry "Better than real ones that we ascribed. Far less stressful. Worthless" His lips raised into an ironic smirk. "That's the way it is, isn't it?"

The stars seemed to be mocking him, indicating very human life for the very thing they represented; just how small he was. He would have taken comfort in the fact, but now it only served to make him feel more small tonight in the wake of his loathing; shrunken-more insignificant in the way he feared he was rather than in a way that comforted him. Not in a promise that nothing mattered this time the way he had found comfort in previously to atone for his own feelings of worthlessness, but rather in a way that seemed to threaten to enflug him with his own issue of how much nothing he was in a way the universe was indifferent to; void eating from the inside out from his end.

He hated them today even more for the fact that the exhibit was wiring the lights so that they were spinning even further now into what seemed like a galactic circle that spun into an artificial milky way. The galactic sound effects were increasing, seeming particularly ominous and harrowing into their echoing of what the museum perceived as the endless expanse of the universe.

"I found one myself that dosen't feel that way. And I'm more than grateful for it."

"To think I can't even take care of myself in this world, and I'm making it even your problem. I can't even keep myself from making even this something that's twisted, and sickly-"

"Bojak, I'm having an incredible time. More than you could ever know."

"Of course you are." Bojack raised his arm from your grasp as he turned his head over his shoulder to gaze at you pointfly. "You come from nothing. You deserve better. You would take anything-and maybe that's the only kind of person that I can hope to make life better for, is someone who's been taken from absolutely everything."

Your eyes gazed at him with an ease of sadness; but your expression turned down in acceptance at his fight of your attempt to dissuade his sickness. Bojack chuckled softly to himself, accompanied by a slight self stabbing humor that was more emotionally layered with heaviness than humor. He turned to look at your reaction; the blue light only continuing to reflect on your unreadable face; but he certainly could read the warmth of it.

He hated not being able to read you as much as you him. It was something that was becoming less frequent the more he felt a natural rhythm within you, but he hate that in its own right all the same; it meant that he was truly getting to know you, and along with getting to know you was, as it turned out, learning how to love you, and that was the most harrowing and intimidating truth of all.

The stars imploded, and the blue and white light reflected onto his skin. He felt as if he could physically drown in them, and for half a moment did he wonder if should allow himself to drown. Boajck was, after all, no stranger to drowning-in that white static sickly way that it seemed the world had always been begging him to be. It might have been easier than the alternative-and the alternative of falling back into his currently womanly shaped sex and tempting addictions he knew that he had long since hadn't able to kep himself away from, for better or for worse, was still dragging him in; still was he indifferent to his quality of life after having so long of asking himself what that inherently even was. In his case, he already knew the answer was worse.

"You don't have to explain anything to me. But I would like to be able to take care of you, at least a little, if you'll let me."

He jumped lightly as he heard your voice suddenly piercing through the thickened air of theatre talk and of the lit trialing soft music box sound that was easing through the area. He raised a brow as he collected himself while he turned and heard your words.

"So you do know how to reel me in from a menta spiral ." Bojack raised up an eyebrow in a playful way as his lip raised into a smile while he looked you over in a light, gentle ease of appreciation. Your eyes turned up as you met his, giving him a soft smile that met the swamrth of your eyes. "I thought I was going to have to start one of my evidently infamous 'depressed monologue.' Name courtesy of Todd, for you to start seeing that I am asking you for help. For, you know, as much as I can."

He could hear the way the swan woman piercing through the air as she let out a wail of laughter, even through the front of the receptionist hallway that was now at least a hallway away. The image of her flirting with one of the richer men flashed in Boajcks' mind-her content in her own personal business of taking in the wretched and fallen and enjoyed their drug induced weakness, and the men taking them in kind. It wasn't jealously that jaded his mind at the thought of the women he fixated on from escapism from either emptiness or, in this case, something too rich and real for him to know what to do except the usual of his cheapened cheat.

He had long since learned that what he was jealous of was whatever wall that seemed as if it had a greater intimacy with you than whatever attempt he couldn't get to to weaponize it and pierce it. He didn't dare turn around to fath the path of the swan woman, knowing that if he did, it would only mean that he was going out to face with those sharp eyes that seemed to know too much of him while also knowing nothing at all-the superficial connection of a woman who could see into his adddtions, and yet see nothing beyond that. You, somehow, would also see beyond whatever the mysterious and barley pierced fogginess of what 'that' was, if anything; and part of him at this point in his life where he would have preferred the muggy darkness of familiarity.

He was both intrigued and fond of the fact of the swan's cheap agreement with his destruction-the way the powerful nature of the feeling scared him, and with that fear came a strong sense of loathing. A lesser, more tentative and less reflective Bojack would have allowed that feeling to control him.

But the equation had complicated now. It came in so many different places that he could no longer perceive where the source was laid, and rather did he allow it to simply enthrall and throttle him, control him beyond what he knew what to do with. But his tenderness was piercing the possession of the green coated beast of temptation, and he was more than willing to follow it, to allow his cowardly nature to retire for the duration of how long his complicated array of a cocky and tender soul allowed it.

"When I first met you, I loved how you knew me," he reflected as he kept his hands firmly gripped on the balcony. He wished his hand had been gripped onto yours- he needed any grounding. But metal was the only material strong enough to balance that sense of desperation, the only thing that didn't crumble onto his tendency to grip on too tightly. The knuckles of his hands turned his brawny skin into a slightly whiter form of brown as he gripped it in his intense focus. "And I still do. I think I've been spending my entire life just trying to be known. To race to be good enough. To earn being loved. And the second that I stop there's just-nothing."

"By who?" you murmured.

Bojack shrugged, jaded pessimism tracing his features, "By somebody. Not…loved. Just…known. Mattering. To not be abused."

He twisted his hand against the balcony as he gave a sickly sharp breath, turning his head away from yours and showing showing off the true deep sonbering nature of his thought. His other fingers started to trace the muscles on his wrist. Even his tender touch to himself felt strange underneath the stagnant air that gave away that he was anything but outside. "But sometimes, I almost wish that you didn't. Because I can't hide."

" You don't have to hide." He turned his eyes to you, exhausted, empty- bu curious.

"I don't, huh? How do you know I'm not hiding now?"

"You don't have to do anything, say anything, or even be anything. Just let me come here and be with you. Be simple. Stop letting the world control you as to what you think you should be. What's enduring is something human and simple. The world will never admit that, and it's not your job to make that your problem."

He wanted to look at you, but he instead settled for the blue lights that traced the wall. The molted green, ghastly white lights and the galactic paint of the space that was surrounding up against every single side of the front of the craven stone was a trail and mesmerizing permission for Bojack to keep unraveling.

"How can something be so fake and so real at the same time?" Bojack's eyes winced as he rolled the words over in thought.

"I guess that's just the way some things are made."

Bojack cleared his throat, shifting slightly. "Yeah. Guess you could say that." He paused as he turned his head back to you. "If you really want to come up here, you can, you know. Your feet aren't frozen into whatever hesitation you have going on. I don't bite. Well-mostly. But you've seen the full extent of how I have tonight."

You paused as you turned to him fully. He found himself finding comfort in how the blue light reflected against your eyes-it reminded him of the times he had tried, and failed, to comfort himself. Somehow, that added onto his courage. "You'll love it. Or, at least, I'll love it, and you can hear me talk my ear off about how much I like it. It'll possibly be of no benefit to you whatsoever, but it'll be fun for the both of us, right?" A small, boyish smirk-and in that moment was there the understanding that the both f you had some freedom for a little while in a simple meaning that soothed the both of you, detached from the loud destructive nature of the world's version of it.

Your lips twitched as you started to inch your way towards him. Your body started to lean against his, a few inches between the spaces of your rags.. His eyes turned back over towards the sky for a moment, winced and puffy laden in tormented thought. He could feel the way you were looking far too much into more than you wanted to let on. Somehow, that only served for him to want to drag skeletons out of his every corner of the sickly subconscious unfathomable but tangible controlling of his back mind even further, rather than to pretend as if they were in there at all.

"I've heard what happened in a place like this," you said. Bojack ears perked abruptly, as if he was stabbed.

"Why are you talking about the fucked up thing that happened years ago? If I bothered remembering every little messed up thing that ever happened whenever I did anything, I wouldn't be able to even get out of bed in the morning. Even more than usual."

" I don't talk about it," you said. "But you talk about it."

"What?" Bojack's expression tensed as his eyes lowered while he looked at your side profile. "When?"

"I can see it in you. It looks like you're breaking, like something physically started choking you. And maybe it is. And I would be more than okay to help you through if it helped you. The only thing that I can't stand is the idea of not being around with you. Not being able to help you. But I did just want you to know that I do see it."

He paused-and then anger and altered defense began low and dim as he turned his congested eyes back to the projected turning over sky.

"I don't get why you want to help me. Especially after everything I've started to be known for. If you weren't such a decent lay, I would be humiliating either of us."

"I don't get why I want to help you, either. But my mind feels sick when I'm alone for too long, and I've been sick the majority of my life. I don't know if I crave connection because there's something about our wiring that makes it impossible for the likes of us to be entirely alone-but I do know that you're the best and most natural soothing I've ever felt."

The muttering of the people beside both of you continued; with nothing but the buzzing of the soft trialing of the delicate music light increasing in front of the balcony. Bojack's silence was heavy, and speaking plenty.

"It's funny." Your hand squeezed around Bojack's arm as you rested your cheek beside his shoulder. I've never considered a voice handsome until I heard you speak."

The statementment was tender enough that it made him pause; everything you spoke seemed to hold double meaning, and something about the ay you spoke them eased Bojack into the part of him that was slower and kinder, both to himself and that of which was around him. He allowed the feeling to flow through him for a moment, and then he allowed instinct to take over.

He reached out his hand as he turned over and looked at you for a clumsy but heavily and utterly human intense moment, his hand coming to encurl into yours as he reached across the balcony-lifting it to his chest in thought before he thought of the action further-and then softly did he grab his fingers against your palm and give it an intense squeeze. The action was shy, yet suggestive as it pressed against your knuckles,a shy tender and yet insistent hue of touch. He then pulled it away as he allowed his empty hand to face towards you as it curled beside his chest, meeting both of his palms; but he was close enough to you now that he could see how much you were intrigued by the action.

"Look, you can either take the hand or you can leave me feeling like a total ass. The choice is yours."

You smiled. " I can see that you can't take the drama out of you no matter where you go."

"You can take the actor out of Hollywood, but good luck taking the Hollywood out of the actor."

The statement felt more ominous than he had planned-but the ease teasing of his charm surrendered you to relax as you reached your hand forward and squeezed it beside his. Slowly did your hand press into his as you curled it away from where his hand had been curled beside his chest, your fingers coming to squeeze against one as you brought it to rest beside the rail.

"I guess this constitutes that you need to be taken cared of too, right?"

He hesitated as he felt the way that his fingers were now glazing against yours as he thought over the gentle invitation of your statement; of an entire world of promise at the suggestion of it. The caresses weren't quite that familiar sense of the comfort you usually gave each other, but his touches seemed to know you well enough from more comfortable encounters. The both of you in genera seemed to know each other with an increased deeper and more profound intensity, even though he had long since learned that there was hardly any chance that he would ever be able to truly love you the way he wanted, and that you would be able to help him in the way he needed.

"Is there wrong with me being taken cared of?"

" Nothing. Nothing at all." Your fingers squeezed the spaces of his hands further. "And there's nothing wrong, especially, when it comes to us, because as it turns out, I really love taking care of you. It's the best thing that anything I've ever done has felt. I can't imagine where I would be without it. And I don't care what or how that means. No one does with anything; the world is too messed up, and people are too complicated." Your head turned gently over to his. "But I want to."

Bojack felt a shiver strike through him, one that quickly subsided to acceptance. The smallest smile in the most modest and humble of expressions started to overcome his features as he looked down and let out a soft troubled rasp of consideration. He kept his hands gently caressed up around the side of your own, enjoying the small treamors of your fingers under the stout and more confident concentration of his touch. Slowly did the black panic of temptation begin to fall away, along with the memories of painted drugs of blurry eyes and even more haunted rotten skin, of a burning sense of a car going too quickly of all the times he had driven through his episodes, broken and loud laughter, severe broken executions of a loud and high pitched laughter of drug induced eyes through his impulsive selfish drug trips, sprained fingers and black bags under tired eyes.

"Everything hurts," he admitted, somber tone meeting exhausted eyes."Everything just feels terrible, all the time. Except for when I'm around you. Then it all starts to make a little more sense. I want to try to do that more-but I don't know if I should. I just know I'm another human desperate for a natural sense of meaning and purpose, the way anyone does, even if they just fill it with sickly television or something just as reversing of a detriment to their own being. Anything is better than what I've done for so long of easing myself into this black, empty space-but it's all that made sense to me."

He paused, surprised at how hard it was to speak the next words as they were haven laden with layered meaning. "With, whatever, you know. This is."

Even as he spoke the words, there was a dark layer from where he was talking and coming from or what he was saying. Still, he felt he needed to speak it. It felt urgent. He could feel the panic of the future yawning in front of him that was a carpenter creating his fate in front of him, spinning on his decisions that were waiting for him in the future as if it were a physical omnius black air. The words of fondness were authentically spoken, but, as usual with him, were jaded and blunt with more haunted baggage than it was worth.

"Do you know where I was just now?" Bojack's eyes were empty but in a fashion that suggested the want for a redressing of an entire new reality, if made possible; the slight understanding that there was a possibility to open up the entire chasm of life in front of him that came along with the incessantly simple but impossible expanse of being in tune with himself despite the world. He indicated his hand beside the rail as he shrugged. "All night, really."

Your lips raised into a bitter smile. "I can tell that you've been somewhere else entirely tonight. I wasn't exactly sure if I should go after you, or if I should let you do what you need to do. I know that if nothing helps you, there's no point in trying to control you. I haven't seen that do you any favors."

"Come on. I wouldn't say nothing helps me." His thumb caressed your knuckle. "Just nothing good. Usually."

"I'm comfortable, Bojack. I'm comfortable today. I'm not tormenting myself with all the possibilities. I'm fine."

"I was just wondering about what it would be like between us if you really knew every way that I had to try to function."

The words were spoken with a certain reflective mirror into what he didn't want to see. There was an ounce of aggravation that accompanied the reflection that was inside his voice, and he smiled as he looked forward in front of him against his hands gently danced inside the spaces of your own.

" I may not be able to see all of you. But maybe I don't need to. Maybe it's better that I don't. Not because I don't want to see all of you-but maybe it's easier for me to love you if you're able to keep some things of your own secret. Things that you're able to keep to yourself. I can be the net to help you make sense of it. And I'm more than happy to try to do that for you. And not for any benefit or attempt to try and to keep myself content from my end."

Bojack raised a brow as he looked to your eyes. "No?"

"I'm drawn to you, Bojack. And maybe it's because I've lost my entire mind, or maybe it's because I found it-but either way I do, and I know that it's something outside of myself. I don't want to deny either of us that.'

The words were almost too genuine.

"I don't know how much you mean it." His expression tensed in a jabbed loathing as he realized what he had meant. "Not that it's your fault. Just that I don't know how you could mean it, not when you haven't gone through the entire scope and..harrowing expanse of what makes up someone's-well, everything, really. Especially journey."

"Well." Your hand squeezed his. "I mean it."

"You don't. You don't know who you're talking to." He met your eyes, which were now widened with trouble, even as you tried to keep them pure and confident. Part of him, in the middle of his blurry vision and with the bittersweet memories of the surrerality of the experiences and hints he had had over the years with drugs, wondered how much of the conversation was real. The thought was enough to make him a black drop, and he squeezed his fingers against yours one last time to drink in that comfort you gave him, but not enough that he was able to fall into it entirely in regards to his trust of much of anything. Certainly not enough that he was able to believe it.

It did, however, serve to reminded him of those softened mornings of how you had kissed and loved on him; had offered him a genuine sense of grounding when he had grumbled and turned over on the other side of the bed, sheets wrapped around his body while his shoulders had been peppered in his kisses before the both of you had waken up into the harder realities of yourselves and the world. The security came upon him without any warning, without him even realizing it. Any chance to breathe once he was around you was one he was still getting used it; but it continued to greet itself to him with a demand. He opened his mouth to try and find words for the future, once again falling into the need to dispel the insecurity, knowing he had to spell out who you had been trying to love only he had to at least try to spell out for you how wrong it was to pursue him, if only for his own peace.

"Look, if we get out of here and you decide-"

His phone buzzed. His sentence was cut off as he turned and looked down at his pocket. Any sense of peace of warm memories he had fallen into was now gone as he turned his eyes to the text-the casual and indifferent name of "Crack Dealer Woman" sped in front of Bojack's eyes, and his teeth winced while he jolted back as he looked over the text.

Hey, big man. Get over to the counter. Your order is here. And payment is due.

The text was nothing in regards to current reality as the feeling of your hands caressed against his again- but it was enough to make him feel the romantic part of him break as he felt the draw to drugs overtake the rest of his headspace.

"One moment." Bojack raised up a finger to gesture his caution as he turned and gave you a gentle but conflicted warning. The lights in your eyes dimmed, but you gave a nod of understanding as you met his conflicted emotion in his expression, a little more jaded and less charming from his sudden kicked up dirt of conflict again as he turned his lowered eyelids to the phone.

Are you serious? Already?

I got the stuff, big brain. It's all over behind the counter, and I know you saw. Don't let that current little dancing distraction called a woman project change your mind. Get your way over here, or I'll give it off to somebody else who needs it faster.

He snapped his fingertips against the side of the phone to turn it off as he closed it, feeling as if he had been physically drenched in a newfound sense of black panic now that the temptation has been so easily turned up to him again. His hand began to tremble, reality in front of him shifting, eyes widened in fear as his ears lowered while he tried to collect his fear.

"All right, well. Maybe you're right. Maybe it is better that I have my secrets," he said, bluntly.

He began to take his fingertips away from your own as you looked at him in question, his eyes dialed in conflict even as he tried to dress it as something controlled. He wanted to kiss your fingertips even as he took in the action to push them away-or to kiss you, in general. Even in this blurred and conflicted moment, he couldn't believe how softly you spoke to him, the way your comforting air was especially lacing against the side of the galaxy of the stars, and there was a part of him that dared to believe that there was a genuine sense of softness that he was able to find in himself as an extension of yours.

But he won't wouldn't allow myself to reflect on that-he was much easier to fall into the side of himself that was familiar. It would be too painful to admit that there was anything else he was capable of. He wouldn't allow himself to even think of it.

"Maybe it is." You stepped back, and Bojack felt a black inside of him at your words; his eyes widened as he watched you tenatviely while you stepped back. That abrasive fear of you giving up on him increased; the same pattern he knew all too well.

"What?"

"Whatever helps you feel ok with whatever decision you make." Your eyes indicated to the phone. "Caller?"

Defense flashed in his chest, and his insecurity quickly became a quick wince."Is that really your way of asking me if I'm okay? Poking and prodding me when I just need to be left alone?" He turned as he walked his body away from the balcony, turning his hard eyes to you abruptly as he he began to settle for walking back to the archway. Your head snapped over your shoulder as you followed him, eyes wet and conflicted in much of the same way he was, but far more warm. "I'll be in the bathroom."

He could feel your eyes watching him as he started to male his way down the hallway.

"Bojack-" You tripped over your feet as you began to follow him; Bojack only gave another low breath of conflicted as he rolled his eyes, but more in a drench of his own haunted conflicte than it was any disdain to do with you. He hated the sound of the soft lightness of your feet, of the sound of your soft voice trailing behind him. His fingers balled into his palms as he walked his way down the hallway, ears lowered, expression on his face tense. "What's wrong?"

"Depends on how to answer something with no answer." He turned his head over his shoulder as he gave you a raise of his brow. "What's right?"

"If you need something-"

He turned, his almond eyes striking into yours. "You need to stop talking like this and making me act like somebody that I don't know how to be."

He hated how soft your expression looked; sickly, well meaning; someone who had been alone for long enough that it almost seemed like a reward for an impossibly long and painful life where there would be no detriment of a downfall if he were to leave you; not unlike him, who felt there was a black harrowing expanse of muggy loathing and sickly inner narratives on the other side of what you shared in this small island of relief you had together.

"I'm not making you be anything."

"Yes you are." He pointed at you accusingly; almost pouted. "You know you are, because I know you read me well enough to know that I can't ask for anything. Especially not anymore than you already have asked from me-what with all of this opening up and trust and expecting me to commit." He waved his hand in a mocking circle, ears lowered down. "But guess what, I'll help you for a little while, maybe you'll even convince me to change my mind for a moment, but this is who I am. Bottom line."

"You know I didn't ask you to do anything."

"Yeah, but you did. You didn't need to say it." His eyelids lowered as he gazed at you, arms crossed now, expression pouted. "We both felt it."

"Bojack, if you think something was said without it being said, then you don't need to question it. You just need to go to it."

"Oh, so you're an expert on how emotional patterns should be listened to now?"

"No." Your eyes melted in conflict. "Bojack, I've been spending my entire life on the streets-I've had every crevice of my life to reflect on all the ways of how it wasn't enough."

"Yeah, and I did the same thing with sitting in an overtly comfortable lifestyle. We both came from somewhere. We connected." He pointed at you with a jaded point, ears lowered as he did so. "But I brought you here to get away from that. I got here to kill something in me that scares me. You were an accident. A good-sexy accident, yes. But an accident. So excuse me if I need to get away for a second."

"Are yo-"

"Cool, awesome, see you later" Bojack almost settled for shouting as he tripped his way through the hallway. He began to rush away enough that was almost dancing in the middle of his tentative need to try and escape from the intensity of how he felt he was destroying you; that lost look in your eyes was more that he could have bothered to want to think more about than having to superficially take it in.

"We didn-"

"Don't look too much into this!" he called over his shoulder. "Bad for you, trust me!"

He began to walk himself away from you entirely, keeping his hands once again propped up around the side of the dirty cigarette box in his pocket as his eyes took on his true mood now; dim and empty, and the guilt dressing up his snout in the fashion to which it always did once he was away from having to see the source of it in front of him. His fingertips shook as it trembled beside the box while he rushed his way past the columns; it wasn't much, or anything at all, but at the very least it was something to grip onto familiar in the messy conflicted and grotesque grim that made up the weakness of human emotions.

He could once again heart pounding inside of his ears as he began to put himself down the hallway, feeling the way that sense of urgency began to overcome him even further now as he panted in that clumsy, low rasped and humbly troubled human low breaths. Whether or not the conversation had just occurred the way he had feared, of whether you would even be there when h felt he could return, he could no longer tell. He only knew that the intimacy that had started to grow, mixed in with the temptation of his addictions, were too much to take.

The panic in and of itself made him feel as if he had taken something without the influence. He made his way over toward the corner as he gripped his hand against the details of the wall while he rushed over to the swan, her long neck gradually leaned backward in a casualty that made him feel triggered in and of itself, if only for the simple fact of how much it reminded him of how little control he had over the situation within the memories of jow many times he had seen her tonight already and the memories associated with it-the digging up of negative narratives that could be executed so strongly and unforgivingly by others, but whether or not the judgment was truthful or not in regards to his actual worth, Bojack had never been able to tell.

"Laid on me, bird feathers," he grunted as he rushed to the desk, wincing as he barely managed to catch his breath, one hand resting beside the counter. The swan turned her head forward as her eyes narrowed as she took in Bojack's clearly troubled disposition, letting out abrupt rasps to catch his breath. "I got your text."

"And I purposely made the text as vague as possible so that I could see your disappointment in person." Bojack's eyes flashed as he looked upward at her glinting teasing expression, darkened in a cocky superficiality he knew from looking in the mirror all too well.

"Huh?"

"We don't have any drugs today."

"Yeah, you made that clear the first time. And then you didn't."

"I figured it would be more fun to suggest this in person. I want to be the opposite of the fool that only does hard things over text, you know what I mean? Things get a little bit boring around here. Have to spice it up a little bit."

He could feel his head beginning to blur again, his vision beginning to flicker as he felt the ringing numbing inside of his ears. "But you said you have it today. I gave you the money and everything. You can either give it back now, or you can make sure that that neck is jammed up inside of your ass of your own bird feathers if you want to pretend like this isn't something that I'm going to allow to be okay." He hands trembled, and he gripped his fingers further into his palm. "What the hell is your deal, anyway? Do you just do this to everyone? Lie to them and tease them to appease your own goddamn boredom all day?"

"Actually, I pretty much just do this to anybody that does things that I don't like. Don't worry, I didn't intentionally make it so that the drugs never got here. Now it was just a lucky coincidence. They said they would have to deliver them another day. It turns over that the 'visions of the sick people were spilling into every type of drug and crack they were possibly trying to take to make it clean again. They're going to do a massive wash through of the drugs, see what happens when they clean the place out, try again."

"Oh." Bojack had finished panting, and his own conflicted devastation of his interaction with you decreased as he turned his eyes down in thought. "So, then, why did you text me and lie to me to come over here right now specifically?" His eyes lowered in dry exasperation. as he looked at her with an aggressive turn in his eyes "Do not tell me that you did it just to be annoying. I can tell from the start it's more than that."

" I came up with an idea why I was sitting here, trying to be able to figure out how I can make this afternoon both worth our while besides-" She indicated her at over to the hallway where Bojack had a roughly and clumsy slammed his back slightly against the side of the wall, his face drenched into a confliction as he had rushed his way down the hallway from where she had watched him disappear with you. "- Appeasing whatever it is that you want to call that entertainment piece you have with you today to keep you for one more day of distracting yourself from the black meaninglessness."

Bojack raised a brow and dryly as he looked her over, elbow leaned heavily on the counter.

"Yeah, appeasing. Which is exactly what you're doing by trying to be able to sell crack to losers and aimless people like me and especially at that guy that was swaying with his hands in yours and being turned into heaven a second ago feeling your palm." His elbow leaned further forward as his full emptiness and exasperation drenched firmly on his snout as he leaned forward and looked at her with a glare. "Not exactly the kind of profession to justify this kind of attitude, by the way."

"I know that you must be caught up in that woman, because I felt that the second thought of both of you came in."

"I'm sorry, and that has to do with…what, exactly, in regards to lying to me about drugs for a second time today and wasting my time even more and making me even more unbelievably annoyed when I'm already trying to be able to keep it under wraps to something that never should have happened today in the first place in regards to not having the drugs?"

"Bojack, this is something that I know you'll be able to get something out of. At least-" She gave a slight shrug of her slender white shoulders as she continued to tap her fingertips casually up against the keyboard, as if to give the message that she didn't particularly care about how this was affecting Bojack and that somehow, she knew that he was in a weak enough in his headspace and soul in general that he would more than likely go along with it with it regardless in the middle of a sickly narrative of not knowing what to do with himself or how to be able to be able to make himself a happy or anything remotely functional person-especially if his feelings for you were something even remotely tangible. "-I'm sure that you will want it once you realize that the benefit that this will have for that woman that you're currently tap dancing yourself around-for whatever reason that I can't even begin to imagine because I imagine even you must have at least slightly better options to than her. But you'll be able to do something that I think you'll be at least vaguely interested in if your heart is really in the right place for the time being with her- at least as far as I felt it when you both came in."

Bojack's body swayed as he leaned his head forward, leaning against it in a lazy and detached and openly sick fashion.

"Hey, swan woman, are you going to give me the drugs today or not?"

The pills I can deliver to you another day."

"Yeah?" Bojack's eyes flickered to the side as his eyelids lowered in a dry exasperation. "So not the very specific way you communicated to me that you would today, then."

"We all have to compromise." She turned her head up as she indicated her head over from where Bojack had rushed from the corner of the hallway. "The same way I did when the energy of the two of you came in."

"The energy?" Bojack kept his brows raised quizzingly as he looked her over. "You're seriously talking about imaginary concepts like that?"

"It's relevant to what I'm about to concern you with. As far as I'm able to tell, anyway."

Bojack's eyes winced at her further, more with a sense of judgment now. "How have you managed to stay in business with a smart side project for this long with all of these concerns imaginary shit like that?"

The swan's eyes turned up to where the hallway was eased into the dim of the dark hallway, expression guarded with a hidden gleam in her eyes that seemed cautious and small stepped in her intention; as if wanting to communicate to Bojack what she was feeling without being too ripped from whatever shelter she had from what she thought was going on. She leaned her neck forward, slender with her eyes lowered, speaking under her breath with a gentle caution curated mostly for her own benefit;

"I called you over here for a reason, Bojack."

"To tease me and jerk me back and forth, I know. I get it. Your life stopped when you realized you had to do this forever and small things like this give you joy."

"Not quite." She finished tapping her fingers beside the keyboard, her eyelids lowered into that cynical and focused cautious look; though as her eyes eased up to the hallways again, she seemed to be unraveling within the desire of what she had felt when you and Bojack had walked in, and there was an undeniable sense of vulnerability to it. "It dosen't take until you have nothing but yourself to realize who you truly are." Her eyes narrowed as her pupils eased over Bojack; his ears lowered as his eyes darts over his body being scratched by her intake. "Most unravel entirely once they're truly alone with nothing but themselves, realizing the slop of what they are after being told who to be or what to do. Nothing but a mesh of wasted and aimless energy of sickness and goo waiting to be told of where to go to continue being told what to do. Some lost their zest for the playful, not because they're not playful, but more so because things that are playful lack the depth and reflection of day to day reality of how things actually are in the playfulness. Nuance of thought, soul, people is already rare at any age-but even more rare is having both zest and nuance."

"I get what you're saying." Bojack eased his shoulder off of the counter, giving a small rasp as he did so as his eyes turned down. "You think I'm a joke and you actively like to poke at me, I get it. If you wanted to say you're taking me as your own personal trophy for the day of having something to mock, you could have saved us both the time so I didn't have to come over here."

The swan paused as her fingertips stopped in their tapping on the keys for a moment, fingers frozen. Her eyes flicked down, beak askew for a moment in thought-and then shoved the keyboard aside abruptly. She eased her elbow on the counter as she began to ease her body forward, neck ducking further to him.

"What are you doing?" Bojack's grimanced as he eased his body back, fingertips coming to cramp into his palm while ears lowered. His body tensed inside of himself as he took in the force of how she leaned forward, her blue eyes wide with an almost pathetic emotion narrative.

"I never meet anyone who feels-" She snapped her head to the side as if in some indication of an emotional temperament of a long term narrative. "-Human, in the longest time. Carries a soul."

"Are you kidding?" Bojack's expression winced as he looked her over, with no attempt at hiding judgment, then turned to dry exhaust as he added-"You wanted to talk to me about things like souls and energy when people walk in."

"It's relevant to what it entices me to do,what I want to suggest, yes."

Though Bojack stayed tense, he placed a hand on his hip as he watched her with a jaded exasperated look.

"What even constitutes a soul?" He kept his voice low, quick, whispered as he spoke.

"I don't know. I didn't think I knew."

"And yet you feel the need to ascribe it to myself and the woman I came in with?"

Her eyes flickered in frantic thought as she turned her expression down, fingertips easing beside the counter.

"Every human and story follows an emotional narrative. Everything is unraveling to people's needs of a gradual turn of processing; devastation of a person's life hits one way one day and then another after a time of nothing but dim reflection starts to become maddening devastation, and then unravels entirely into an implosion. When the both of you walked in there was this.." Her eyes turned in frantic thought in front of her; Bojack could see the mania and madness in her eys. "-Energy, in a sense. An entire life of something that felt layered, full of a specific mood of a way that dressed up life that when I felt it, it was so beautiful that it overpowered me for a moment to take it in; like I was feeling such a specific emotional wave of life that was so layered, beautiful, full of meaning that I wanted to pursue it forever-or at least have it be apart of me as much as I could. I've never-" Her eyes turned down as there seemed to be a tremor in her neck while she seemed to cramp with emotion with visibility. Bojack watched her with a guide of concern, that somber grace on his expression that came in with seeing the distressed.

"Bojack, how do you feel about having intercourse? Right now, under the desk."

Bojack's eyes hallowed while the whites of his eyes widened as he met the insistence of her eyes; bold, confident in her request.

"What?"

"No one has to know. No one even cares-I only came here under the guise of someone who was taking the stand in of the previous person's position today."

"Ok, but-"

"Or was I right and that woman is just as heavily drenched with meaning and the bonding between the both of us as much as I would think?"

"What?" Bojack's eyes darted to the side in nervous thought, drenched white wet nature of his emotion eased firmly into his aged features as he snapped his head away from her for a moment. "No, not at all."

The swan swallowed again, foggy thought in her eyes, flickered and manic.

"When I first felt the both of you, it felt like this soothing meaning, a rhythm of an agreement between two energies-and I've had hints and pieces now and then that that was the guide to all relief but never as richly or as present, confidently, as much as the two of you." Her eyes flicked up to Bojack now, drenched in a wet brisk sickness of insecurity, and Bojack's eyes flicked down as the muscles on his face treamored-the brokenness and open sickness someone far more human than the complacney of the employees around him with fogged over eyes. "Bojack, I don't know what you and that woman are doing together, but whatever it is, it's what most people on this earth, in America, aren't doing."

"We're not doing anything. She just-"

"-And if I know anything, it's that the majority of the world is sick and insane, but people do it, because we're wired to follow the heard, to think its the only way we can survive. Including me. But whatever I felt when the two of you walked in-it was this life inside of me that's away from the corrupted mainstream, away from the foggy inhuman complacency that people have settled for-that I settled for."

"Why?"

"The same reason anyone does." Her voice hitched and twisted in a soft pain as she gave a small shrug. "I couldn't imagine what I was missing. The true beauty of being alive."

Bojack's eyes flicked away from her insistence, expression furrowed in concern of thought. His fingertips played, his eyes turned down in consideration. He paused as he gave a slight breath of consideration, thought over his words, his mind muddled in drugs and panic; but there as a truth too profound for him to imagine denying, and the sickness of desperation in her eyes was tugging for Bojack to continue to ease the truth out of him; the more tender part of his heart inspired.

"When I met the woman, it felt like the way it feels when the few meaningful things in life happen to you that opens up a snapshot of a certain feeling in life that only genuine profound experience can of something worthwhile and meaningful. When you know that something in a life of stagance, if you're lucky, you'll have a few island of life of meeting someone that inspires something out of you that's so profound that it's almost tragic how much it makes you feel."

The swan nodded, the brisk and red edged sickness in her eyes seeming soothed through his words.

"It felt like this specific life and timestamp that you just-know when you feel something actually human happening to you, a person that touches you for whatever reason that you know you'll never get from anything again other than that one experience with that person, and it's one of the few things so profound that nothing can ever take it from you. Life takes away most things, but that one feeling, rare and as arguably fleeting as it is, overcomes it." He laughed lightly, the kind that happened when lost in heavy thought. "I spent my entire life not knowing what I wanted and if I did have the intuition, it was also so crazy that it was mostly just fatal. She feels like the open opportunity of that crazy feeling I always had inside of me that came along with this constant feeling in the back of my head that I was always doing something wrong, but I never knew where that crazy direction looked like action wise. I just felt the need to implode, to not do the actions I felt every day because it felt so infuriating, every moment, like I was detached from the life around me and all the while my…soul, if you want to call it that, was somewhere else. The intuition has a place to go now. A place that has meaning and humanity and inner freedom-but feels warm, safe, in contrast to the alternative of this aimless tortured energy." He was relaxed now, his body eased beside the counter, palm eased onto the counter as his fingertips eased into his palms in the cramp of his fingers. His eyes turned up as he gave a wince of thought and looked to the swan. "Is that more of something that you're suggesting?"

The swan eased her body further forward, her blouse and breasts easing in front of the counter as she leaned her arm forward across it. Her slender fingers were easing out into a flirtatious suggestion, though her palm didn't dare come to touch Bojack further than a few inches.

"Bojack, are you together?"

Bojack's eyes flared up with emotion of confliction at the suggestion; an ease of guilt-and then finally, a soft dry acceptance.

"I mean-no."

The swan eased further, and that crazed erratic desperation in her eyes was only increasing in her emotion. Bojack didn't turn his body away from the counter, his eyes turning down to her hand as he watched her ease her hand further to his arm.

"Please make love to me."

"No." His eyes widened as he turned his guilty eyes to the archway. His head turned as he met her eyes again with a more guilt ridden rather than judgemental tone. "Why?"

"I want to feel it. You have this-emotionally somber intelligence to you. Depthful, rather than trashed with superficial distraction. And the beauty of what you both felt together when you came in-I want to know it. Like anyone looking from the hole of their small intimate life, I can only get the sensation of anything outside of that. And normally I would accept that, but-" Her body eased further forward, her hand inches away from Bojack. He didn't turn away from the swan, but his eyes turned down in careful, distant emotion; though from Bojack's tender end of insecurity and temptation, it was now only becoming a further muddled detail of relentless inner emotional narratives to reject her; and the sense of doing so was increasing.

"There is no beauty. That was what you thought was happening."

"Are you committed?"

"No." The muscles on his face tensed as his eyes turned down in pouted thought, and then a slight dryness as he added; "Not even in the slightest."

"Then get your mind off of that dedication she's inspiring out of you. If you don't want it, distract yourself."

"What? Ew." Bojack eased his hands off of the counter while he turned it back to his chest in that insecure, delicate manner, body turning into himself in that feminine delicate way.

"Bojack-please." Her previously confident was treamoring now, and Bojack's eyes were wide and empty with his insecurity as he saw her eyes ease up to his in her insistence. "I want to understand it. And if you don't want the weight of it, and I know it's there, then at least let us try and make things a little easier for a little while. Be present, even in he bewildered cheapened brokenness. All we need is confidence, even in the bad."

"But she's here." Bojack's eyes darted in his concern of insecurity as he turned his eyes back to the archway again, and his heart rushed; not because of the swan's pressure, but because he knew he wanted it. His insecure expression turned back to his hand as he eased his hand onto the counter, teeth poking as he gave a shaken breath. "She'll know. I can't afford that. She's living with me right now."

"Bojack, I don't know if I believe in God-but I do believe in the idea that there's something in certain elements and relationships that's so surreal and profound that everyone is desperate to scramble for it. Do you feel it with her?"

Bojack paused as he heard the suggestion in her voice, as well as an increasing sense of a desperate feeling of lust that he knew he couldn't control if it were initiated. He turned over his shoulder as his dim and tired eyes eased over to the hallway to make sure you hadn't come walking through the hallway again-then turned to the swan as he shot her a jaded look, eyelids heavily lowered over his eyes as he swayed in the after affect of his first shot of drugs, but also the wrecking of his emotion.

"Yes." Tone upright and blunt, a authentic admittance to the emotion-then eyes turning to the swan as his tender eyes met hers, low and dry with the heaviness of his truth, even as challenging and as it could be and unexpected with the constant trail of the changing process."Yes, I do."

"There's a lot of pain and challenge in that woman. And the ironic thing about both of those things is that nobody is alive until they feel the full extent of both of those challenges."

His expression was somber and detached as he spoke; "Is that why you became an under the hand crack dealer?"

"I want to have that feeling the both of you gave me tonight. I don't know if it's me or you or something she carries, but if you feel the weight of it, and I know you do, then maybe there can be an exchange."

"An exchange? You think I can 'transfer' the chemistry we have to you just by making love?"

"I don't understand it, Bojack. But it's maddening, what I want and how I want it; not you, but something you carry."

"Not me. Thank you for the clarification."

And we can both get something we want out of it. You get your lay."

"And you-what? Get to say that you tried to 'transfer' something like a soul over to you? Anything about that sound childish to you at all?"

"Well, on a more literal level-I get my photo with you from behind the counter and leverage into pop culture. We both win, either way; you get to cheapen yourself and your person the way that's comfortable for you, and get to chase that-something, and even if I don't there's plenty of cheap photographs and niche websites full of woman that love exclusives of people like you with a bit of a name attached to make them feel desirable. Interesting. I'll make sure to send the speed crack out as quickly as possible to you when I can, top speed, just for being my companion for the night-and if nothing else, I know we can both agree on how aware that is."

His eyes flickered between hers. "You're serious."

"As can be."

He paused. His teeth were poking out in that nervous timid fashion he held as eyes turned down in conflicted thought. His eyes flicked over to the dark passage of where you had come from, eyes wincing in tentative ease of thought. He turned his eyes down for a moment in consideration-then eased his head up to the women as he readjusted from that heaviness and instead began to fall to full, resounding acceptance of complacency. The swan woman's eyes eased forward in jolted desperation-as thick as ever.

"You're sure you want to do this?"

"You can ask as many questions as you'd like, Bojack. I know beyond anything of how sure I am."

Bojack closed his eyes, muscles on his face treamoring, then breathing a reset as he opened with eyes with a resolved exhaust.

"Using my addiction against me with your stupid womanly curve. And lured in by the promise of drugs at a museum and forming relationship that looks just like the event you know I can't handle unless there is drugs. Very clever. I'll tell you that."

He began to make his way back to the counter. He leaned his elbow against the counter as he looked the woman over while she eased her body upright from where she had been leaning against it, craning her head upward as she gave her a quick raise of her smile in gratitude.

"By the way, crack served in a museum? One of the most clever excuses I've ever heard of not seeming like the kind of suspicious that someone would think of if they were to try and haunt out people like us. But also-what an excuse that you managed to unfurl out of yourself to get someone like me to even fall for it to begin with. You must practice a lot with these grimy locations frequently."

She watched as Bojack began to walk his way back behind the counter, her body readjusting as it leaned back and upright while she watched Bojack make his way beside the counter.

"I don't know what to tell you. I'm just trying to let you know what it is. I tried everything that I could to try and convince myself of sense in some way-reason. But I couldn't distract myself from what I felt. So you're going to have to either enjoy this event for what it is, or maybe it's karma trying to tell you to be honest with your loved one next time, so that desperate, 'lost' people like me won't get caught up in trying to be apart of whatever it is that they see in you."

"She's not a loved one." She's-" He scratched the back of his neck, insecurity in his expression; but somehow even so much as the suggestion that you were a loved one was more insulting to Bojack than anything else the swan woman had said that night. He stopped the bewildered conflict in his mind with a shrug. "Like everything else. You know. Temporary. "

Her lips raised upward on her beak in a confident grin-one that had more layered emotion under it that she would have executed on the surface for now; not unlike a tide of something that was being unraveled with too much weight for either of them to dare to look too much into. Her hand slipped from the counter as she straighted up behind the desk, her body turned back with ease as she looked Bojack over.

"Naturally. That's why your type likes. You'll return back to this old patterns eventually-don't worry. I'm not worried about it in the slightest; especially if you've been so willing to come around here tonight, to open yourself up to this offer regardless of whether you're at peace with it or not."

Bojack shrugged, eyes turing upward to keep from looking too deeply into eyes that felt as if they could intersect and intertwine into every which way he could be destroyed-not in a comforting fashion the way he was struggling to even halfway accept with you, but in more of a definitive and destructive, desperate and clinging way; the way of which he had lived his entire life to to the small bits of human attention he got. "I don't know about 'like'when it comes to things like that. Maybe..used to."

"You don't change," she insisted. "If you want to trade an eye for an eye, a good time for a good time. I'm as fine with that as you are."

"I thought you said you wanted to try this because you felt something worthwhile." Bojack's voice had an edge of a authentic desperation of despair to it, a tint of a fight that suggested someone more worthwhile than what the was allowing to occur.

"But we don't need to overcomplicate it. It can be two things at once; the both of us, feeling something profound, and yet denying it and doing the far more cheaper, complacent thing. To follow it and see what occurs, to ignore the remarkable.

Bojack's eyes eased down into a humble, lost expression as te full lostness of his expression came over him in his tormented resolve.

"You don't know what it's like trying again. You don't know what it feels like waking up every day and feeling like this."

"All the more reason to get lost in me, correct?"

Her features ruffled against her humanoid elbow as she reached out a hand to graze onto his skin. He felt himself shiver at the bleak caress of her touch-and felt a stab of violent red that he didn't push her away.

"The way you talk isn't sexy or sophisticated. It's more like-" He paused, trying to ignore the feeling of her fingers on his hand or the black regret that followed underneath the layer of his relief of the pattern of something like her interaction. "The taste of something I've already done."

"You know you want to experience this as much as I do."

"Why don't you stop being one of the biggest cliche rats of temptation I've ever met and just give me something? I need something."

"I gave you my offer. You can take my answer or you can leave. It's up to you. Either way, I've given you everything that I can. And I've meant every word that I've spoken tonight-and if you want to take everything I've said and share in it tonight, give one another a little relief-I think that's the best we can hope for."

Bojack turned as he felt his hand being cradled ber her slender white ones, his hand complacent in his empty and muddled mind that had very little of any direction of where he wanted to take himself, as he always did every time he felt a woman come onto him the way they did now; the thread of her fingers beside his palms as she caressed and eased her hand beside him in increased insistence, his hand heavy in energy with muddled and bewildered complacency, unknowing of what path would lead where; of which one would lead to suffering in ways he was fearful he wouldn't be able to stand.

His breath was increasing within a slight labored panic as he tried to go through his head every other possibility. He could already feel his templeton floating up in front of him in the same way he recognized all too well-that sabotaging temptation that he knew possessed him from all sides and would leave very little, if any, room to rummage around in the cages he had long since built for himself.

But his fingertips eased beside his palm in acceptance, panicked broken scattered part of his desperation landing on an answer, and though he knew it was one that tasted stagnant and unwanted in whatever made up the trail of a mind, it already had a certain comfortable promise that wouldn't go anywhere-and the comfortability of it was too strong in his timid possession of himself. It wasn't something he wanted to do, but rather something that he felt he needed to do. The broken narrative of how he felt about himself offered no other alternative. He felt he would break inside himself somehow without it-and knowing himself as he had come to know himself throughout his life with no meaningful spark of being connected or seen to help him out of it, he knew he had to follow the same pattern that promised caring for him; even if and especially poison, his only promise of anything familiar in an aimless cowardly heart.

He turned his eye back up to the swan, eyes drenched in a jaded defeat that lacing his air just as well.

"Do you want to make this a quick hit-and-run? I just really need something to distract me right now."

The swan let out a laugh, the carefree noise echoing through the hallway. Bojack's eyes widened as his ears lowered while he frantically looked to the left and right side. Several of the richer figures turned as they looked in their direction; but their sentences in their comfortable and stagnant warm talk didn't even so much interieurtips in their physical movement as they turned their heads back to their own muddled warm conversion just as quickly.

"Quiet it down, ok? Christ." Bojack's hands turned in front of his chest, and he turned as he watched her with a flair in his eyes and a heated fight in them of his own confliction of embarrassment for being caught in what he knew would destroy him if thought about, much less recognized and made real by others, too quickly. "I get it." He waved his hand in a exasperated gesture as he stepped to her further, ears lowered as he allowed his hand to be kept in her welcoming palm. "We need to do this."

She calmed slightly, though the twisted heat of her desperation didn't leave her face; and the laughter in her tone rested to a somber acceptance while the truth of the next activity began to settle into reality.

"Are you serious?"

"Keep laughing, bird flow. I said yes.. Especially if you don't give me what I need. I think you know that, too. Make this easier on the both of us and give me something to make this entire trip worth my time. I didn't come all the way over here, go through of all of this pretentious high up bullshit with the promise of drugs, plan all this, send texts that I didn't want to send, just for it to not work out. Not exactly an option at this point."

"I'm as willing to give you want you want as much as you are me, if you see this can both use one another."

"Yeah. Use. Easiest thing that comes to anyone around here."

"If you don't want to, I have other options."

"Sure you do. That's must be why you kept asking me to come over, right? Or the spell you went on about on feeling like you've never felt anything the way that you felt when the both of us walked in before? incredibly strange thing to say, by the way, but with the amount of strange things that I've been doing lately, I'm not going to put you on the pedestal."

"Thoughtful."

"Hey, at least we're both trying to be able to figure it out together, and if I was being honest- that does feel better than tripping over myself for the rest of this afternoon just trying not to make this poor woman even more traumatized than she already is, and trying to make things at least one more soothing and easier in this crazy world."

"So you don't mind, then, If I end up being wrong, or if you end up being wrong-and this intercourse that we have for the sake of trying to be able to lessen your anxiety with experiencing what you have with the woman and me with wanting to try to be able to experience a little bit of myself goes wrong, or if anything happens with the drugs later on even when you're back at home with the woman?"

"I'm sorry, what?"

"That if she gets caught up into trouble because of us, or if she ends up getting hurt spiritually in some kind of way?" She shrugged her slender shoulders. "Since clearly neither of us understand what's going on and even less how to be able to navigate it,and I think that we both be very foolish to try to be able to deny that to either of ourselves-, especially before hopping up into a fire, although I can't deny that right now for whatever reason it feels like the best decision that I ever could have hoped to be able to come up with. Considering the emptiness of where I'm standing in life, and I don't want to be in my position anymore if you'll let me."

"And you think I'm the answer."

"I'm tired of faking, I'm tired of waking up every day and just going along with it this job of sneaking around with my head down for the sake of trying to be able to smuggle little bit of extra money and the other things that I do all the time that's so inhuman and fake. It turns out that when a person turns their entire life coping into a mechanism of only thinking of an idea that it could be a better one day, all they do is become boring and dry and dead inside themselves because there's no truth to anything that they do in their action. I've had no truth for years now, no humanity, and I've felt others who feel the same-a constant harrowing pain. I felt that truth when the both of you walked in, and I don't care how I'm able to experience it, I just know that I want to."

Bojack's eyes flickered in quick thought, face trembling in his indecisive nature-but his eyes turned forward as he felt the caress of fingers beside Bojack's palm, and something in the grimance of his expression eased into a sober and accepting tremor as he met her eyes, lowered and eased in her heated invitation.

"Come on, Bojack." Her head tilted to the side as she gave him an increased intrigue of heat. "We can even leave the small woman back to the side of the road, if you'd like-she can figure out her own way from there."

"What?" Bojack's hand eased out of her palm for a moment, expression trembled as his eyes darted down to where her hand was eased beside his palm as a conflict came in his eyes of disgust. "No."

"Why not?"

"Because. It dosen't feel right. She-" Bojack darted his eyes to the side of the open space of the theater, expression treamoring in painted conflict.. "It's not-"

"The worst thing that could happen is that you lose something you made clear you didn't feel you were in debt to, right? If you don't feel any genuine obligation to her, and you feel like you could do intercourse like this without a second thought, then I hardly see what there would be to lose."

"I didn't mean it like that." Bojack's eyes flared at the woman as he snatched his hand away from here a few inches; but not enough for him to detach from her entirely, which seemed to give the woman all the continued encouragement she needed. "I didn't mean throw the woman out on the streets again."

"Don't you think there's no loss, especially if her being in your life has been far too much for you to handle anyway?"

His ears straightened in shock, then lowered in a slight shame. "No," he turned as his puffy eyes turned to the archway, eyes darkened. "No. I don't want to do that to her. She deserves better than that." His eyes eased in conflict of heat, then turned as he looked back over at her with a pointed jaded edge. "And I didn't pay for that. I could do that whenever I want this afternoon, if I wanted to. But I won't, because I can't 'do' you or anything else back at my place. And as it turns out, you're about the best product that's here tonight."

"And you're the most lost."

His hands grazed the counter, the other still kept on the counter. "Touche."

"If you want to, we only have so much time. My next client is in a few minutes."

His eyes widened, slight flair and odd panic easing into his eyes. "My god, how many clients are you signed up for today?" His eyes lowered into exasperation as he gazed at her pointfly. "And a better question is how many of them did you screw over tonight like me and are ringing them into something else?"

"It's just a line of business, Bojack. Even the spiritual intuition. I just wanted to know if you wanted a silver lining for the afternoon of attempting to make up for the drugs being lost. There's nothing I could have done about it."

"Nothing you could have done? Not losing or selling me crack you knew was bad, when I needed it the mo-"

He cut himself off, a sigh leaving his lips as he turned his worried eyes to the theater entrance and thought over the next few actions, teeth poked in worry. His eyes were darted in worry, but something inside of him became exasperated and somber as he breathed an inward sigh, turning his dry eyes back to the swan.

"Ok, look, making love sounds like a decent trade off, all things considered. I do technically have a claim on anything you can give me the second you screwed this up, so why don't you get down and make this something that's worth the time for the both of us? Worth the trouble? Or do you want me to come out of here after this is over blown out of my mind due to the fact that you dangled a steak in front of a starving horse and pretended like that was ok? Not to mention-influence. I have influence, whether you think I do or not. And I know how much influence affects your little business."

Her body leaned forward until he could smell her breath beat against his face-it smelt of a strange combination of fruits, perfume, and something that smelled like the metal form of some mechanical processing and burning plastic no doubt related to smuggling drugs who had already had enough other tastes and scents graze her mouth for the day. "You're getting yourself caught up in a pickle, Horseman."

"What else is new?" His voice was more focused and somber now, oddly ashamed in a way that carried a form of dignity to it-far more focused and full of intent now that he knew what she was suggesting. "Come on, birdbrain. You're sexy. I'm a mess. Everyone knows it. I know it. Let's jam it together like the way the stripper does on that episode of Horsin Around and get going." His thumb grazed her wrist. "You have seen that, right?"

"Frankly, I only know most influencers from tabloids, my business transactions, and whoever reaches out to me in the middle of the night attempting to ask for trade and drug orders at an odd time."

Bojack's face lowered in thought, vague surprise caught against his features-and an odd tint of worry and sadness. "Seriously?"

"If you think I'm here because I have any respect for you-"

"No, I know." His ears lowered as he closed his eyes, jaded thought caught in the action. "We're just doing it because we're here. And this situation is ugly. Got it."

"I wouldn't say ugly." Her hand took grip of Bojack's wrist, gradually beginning to pull him forward. He watched as he felt his self control already starting to leave him in its entirely, mouth going dry and eyes watching in an almost animalistic observance as worried timid eased turned as he looked up at her, eyes bulged.

"Well, it's not like there's any strings attached. We're just trying to fill in the void for a night."

"Yes. You made that very clear from your end." His words were becoming more broken up as that all too familiar wave of lust started to rush through him. Her hands were slender and inviting, her eyes turned into a fliting and narrow eyed insistence as her beak raised up into a flirting satidication,

"Get over here, big guy."

He let out a hallowing grunt as he began to rush his way over to the counter, snapping his head to where he had left you before he kneeled downward behind the counter entirely, eyes winced and ears lowered as he kneeled in front of the swan woman, who began to readjust her body as she kneeled her long form beside him. You weren't following him, and for the time being, he didn't take that as a sign of whether or not you were giving up on him, or whether you were requesting his clear need for space-he only simply took it for the time being in his numb state that he didn't need to worry about you; for now. He didn't dare to look into it any further than the simple fact that you weren't there, and that was all the sign and permission he needed.

"Alright." He rolled his shoulders as he took a deep breath, eyes wincing as he got on his knees, cramped into the slighter nicer clothes he had taken to wearing as he turned his tentative eyes to the swan woman that curled and ducked herself beside him. "Nice and easy, quick and sleazy. Like the way it should be."

He panted heavily as he kneeled his way further to her while her slender body followed the general direction of his unknowing, the both of them erratic and full victims of the turning tide of the meaninglessness of that of which surrounded them that caused them to be in the experience of it time and time again within their own helplessness, Bojakc knowing his patterns of being one of the countless people succumbed to the mundanity of existence and his own turn and throttling of character showing off its muggy uncertainty as to how to cope, the mundanity of life making a fool of everyone and ultimately showing off how foolish they themselves were in their detached helplessness of what they were brought into. He would have felt black shame, were it not for the fact that this was overly famailir, and Bojakc had long since learned that to try to impress people or to work hard was only to buy into the idea that he had to be drugged into the manipulation of the rat race for the sake of impressing people who would never care; the forceful need to work hard was only the start of the manupilatuion that would only lead to those same people only abusieng him further the more he bought into the first phsilisophy of working hard that had brought him into the hands of people who would never love him and would only tell him to work harder as the trail went on; the beginning trail of abuse that would lead to abuse as the path went on. He had no problem playing into the lazy ass stereotype of those people from that end; he was insightful enough to learn a long time ago, though self esteem would always wear from his inherent human nature of being told he should care, that it was all a game of misery of sinful human nature that would never be satisfied.

In regards as to how it affected you, however, was the reason why his teeth were poked in his emotional shame; why his eys were bugged and the muscles on his face treamored with a deep sense of layered guilt.

"Get whatever photo you want to show off to your friends. Sticking your tongue down my throat. Kissing my ass. Naked photos. Whatever it is that makes this easier."

She raised a brow. "You are making this easier by having such a great attitude about it."

"Sure." His blunt tone, devoid of remarkable emotion, and lowered hooded eyes showed off all of the blunt exasperation he could manage as he tilted his head forward, already succumbing back to his belief of his own unremarkably, as the world had shown him and told him time and time again. "I'm just telling you to go have fun. You can brag about this to all of your other little bird braided friends when this is all over." His hard eyes turned to where he felt her slender hand ease beside his palm in question. "Whatever."

"I just need a photo. Anything to give me leverage." Her white, feathered hands started to graze the side of her phone as she pulled it from her pocket. Bojack watched her with a dry and dull throbbing in his chest, and the wince and insult in his eyes increased as he saw her slender fingers tap and handle the phone.

"I thought you said you wanted to do this because you wanted to see if you could experience, or, and I can't believe I'm using this kind of language in regards to emotion-'transfer' the experience you had of myself and that woman would coming in."

Her narrow eyes turned up from where her emotional and maddening eyes had been drenched in her occupation with the phone. Her eyes snapped up as she looked over at Bojack, and something flashed in her eyes buried in heat and a sudden inspiration as she pulled her attention away from the phone, turning it down beside her dress' pocket again, hand pressed against it in forgotten leave.

"Are you going to help me to realize what that mean?"

Her eyes were narrow, the pink of her blouse beginning to fall rather than cling onto he redress. There was something in her eyes that spoke of a leave of her own teasing and insistence as she narrowed her expression while turning her eyes over and gazing at Bojack in insistence. Bojack's teeth poked out as his eyes turned over her body for a moment, expression on his face tense as he thought over his temptation. It was more for anything good, and for the most part was in debt to only bad; and that was cheap and familiar, and she was sexy and young and had that air of a grounded confidence in her that Bojack had always lacked.

He slammed her against the side of the wall behind the counter, giving a mumble of his clumsy breath as he did so as the muscles on his face tensed with longing. He began to grab his hands up and against her feathers between her fingertips, the more immature and hardly controlled side of him enjoying far too much the feeling of how she squirmed under his touch as she gave a slight thrill of a laugh-the kind that spoke that she knew she had had a sense of superiority over him from the start, and was now enjoying and lavishing herself within it without guilt. Whatever deep sickness that naturally followed Bojack that he harbored at all hours in its indescribable feign, it was released from the act of physicality; just as it ever had been.

She let out a soft whine as his lips caught between hers, empty and distant and detached, the complete opposite of the attachment he felt with you. Her head snapped back, slender and trembling under his touch as he started to succumb further to the hunger that traced his fingertips.

"Yeah," he breathed. "No strings, no attachments. Just good old fashioned sex. That's good. This is good."

His eyes rolled to the back of his head as she started rummaging her body against him, slender white hips soft with her feathers as her hips eased beside his body. His brawny, chubby arms found their way against her body as she centered and wiggled herself against his embrace, her white cheeks stained red with a certain kind of lust haze that overcame and possessed his own between her cheap makeup. His eyes lowered as he leaned forward and pressed his jaded heat against her lips several times, allowing his tongue to gently pressed against the side of her own as the muscles on his face treamored again in his lusted want.

"The problem with the truth of existence is that it's all that matters and all that touches people and all we long for-and its the one thing that's the most hidden and distained." The swan's mouth gave a titled breath of her own amusement as she felt Bojack's lips press beside her beak, his lips turning in their soft brawny touch beside her beak as she gave her own sounds of tilted and satisfied breaths between his intimacy. "You feel like that reality to me."

"Good to know."

"It is good to know. You should feel good for it. It's a compliment."

"Do I get to pay you less for the complete lack of peace that I felt today before this happened because of your poor communication skills, or do you want me to just throw some hundred dollar bills so you can prove this happened to your brain rot friends who evidently think it's worth it to go through all this for something as mundane as see a guy throw his tongue down your throat?"

"Photo will do it," her mouth pulled away from him for a moment as she gave a breath, clearly meant to collect herself. Bojack let out his own breath as he felt her push against him for a moment, hands shaken and trembling beside his chest as she heaved under his touch. "Watch the tongue."

"Like you'll say no at this point. You'll do anything for that photo. I've dealt with people like you before."

She opened her mouth to reply, but he grazed a hand against her shoulder. "Hey, it's ok. Nothing to be ashamed about. There's no harm in being a superficial woman. As long as you're sexy enough to make it in the sheets, you'll be ok for most men."

Her lips raised into a grin, though it seemed darkened with her own jadedness. He knew that look all too well-it was so different from what he had become used to within your far more gentle form that seemed as if it came from some pure experience he had almost forgotten existed in his lifetime and interaction of bloated privilege that he had always thought was helping rather than harming him.

Her hand gazed on his thigh, and his eyes turned upward as he let out a hiss, a soft and gentle feeling of excitement that struck through his thighs that was demeaning just enough that he could feel the heat strike through his body that sent a jolt through him that reminded him why he did this, and what made it all worth it-guilt, panic, and hardly inclined senses of functioning included.

And yet still, that guilt persisted, and it was far more harrowing than it ever had been-it had a certain new mood to it, a demand that very to little of any room to ignore it.

"Let's both get this over with," he mumbled as he crashed his lips against hers again. The superficiality of the sex felt like some strange washing away from the attachment he had been building with you-a reminder of the part of himself that was far more familiar and easier to cope with. The emptiness was harrowing, but it was the lifetime of the constant reminders that had haunted him in the past that no matter what he had done, it never would have been enough-and he felt very little to any care to anything other than the rhythm that was the existence equivalent of keeping his head down until he died, the horror of anything else beyond that graceful falling to the side.

His lust reached the bones of his body as he enwrapped his arms further around her slender and feathered waist, letting out an easy and husky lusted husk as he enwrapped his arms around her leg, hosting her slender body up and into his embrace. Her slender neck leaned backward, exposing itself to him as he let out a grunt and started to pepper his lips against her neck-the action was devoid of intimacy and feathered into complete emptiness as he started to raps his mouth against her feathers. He could feel that complete sense of falling into the parts of him that were far from healthy or wanted, but they were him-the sides of himself that were entirely his own, the parts of him he had woken up to countless nights before, and the one consistency in his life that kept him grounded and full in the ironic wake of the emptiness on the other wise of it.

"Into me," he husked againser her feathers. A slight edge of vulnerability as he added; "Please."

Her body trembled as she let out a laugh. It was more stifilied than the ones he had heard her echo into the air previously-but still had the same amount of a strange sense of superiority and ridicule that he was sure he didn't want to become too familiar with.

The ghosts of the way you had touched him seemed as if they were both glaring and absent as his cock began to press between her white legs that grazed against the side of his hip. His clothes were falling off as he let out a raspy and cackled hum that further executed his lust. He felt both a black loathing and a white washed relief as he felt the spoiling of her touches against the curves of his body. His bags felt more prominent, the clothes falling off of the edge of his body as it twisted under her fingers that grappled onto him like a superior sense of accomplishment, the same checklist he had been used for before to keep him from too much of deepened reflection. He would rather have it stay in white subconscious sickliness.

He jammed his lips awkwardly against the side of her neck as he thrusted into her, and her neck twisted as she let out a moan that made Bojack's ears turn backward, eyes darting up to the side of the counter as he felt his pupils dilated for a moment in panic. He didn't dare untangle himself from the woman enough to take to actually looking over the counter; that would have caused him to raise himself up and to release his arms and risk being seen.

"Can it," he whispered. "Unless you want the rest of every known photographer to be tripping over themselves to see what you do behind the counter."

"That was part of my point, wasn't it?" Her eyes were sickened with nothing but motivate hat made her seem like a sickly and empty woman as she eased her neck up to him in insistence, eyes trialing up to his and pupils flared into what seemed like the very experience she had spoken of spiritually that seemed to be overwhelming her now; Bojack couldn't allow himself to search inside of himself to see if he was aware or not of it himself. He was already too afraid and numb of it enough as it was.

"Trust me, whatever gossip or money you're making off of this, you'll want to keep it to the high pitched girl gossip. When it reaches the rest of the world, you'll have more than you ever bargained for, believe me."

His hands were gripped onto her shoulders with an embarrassing amount of insistence, eyes winced and breathing panting as he continued to keep his focus on holding her. Her eyes turned downward in amusement as she gazed at him through a mouth half open in both lust and frozen in a cocky spiral all at once.

"My God," she said. "You really do need this, don't you?"

His eyes turned downward to her breasts. He didn't want to cheat himself out the feeling of the desperate and deranged longing that was fighting itself without mercy against his chest that he knew wouldn't go away unless he gave himself the poison, dressed as medication and lusted filled temptation,, that he was so used to and inclined to getting. Her feathers were traced and grazed again his skin where your fingertips had pressed and caressed into his own on those nights when he had instinctively leaned and shivered into you with both fear and desire in the middle of the night, your hands pressed against him as he had almost instinctively pressed himself into you.

To kiss you in that moment would have reminded him of all the emotional complications that he didn't want to deal with-but this, this was familiar. This was easy for him. This was small, finite,painfully so-just as himself, incomprehensibly small and pathetic despite his efforts; and he had learned in his inner insight a long time ago seen by no one except for those flowered motherly eyes you possessed that the only way to find peace with reality was to accept it. And finite and pathetic was what he was going to choose tonight, just as he would ever night in his disgruntled existence until he was gone. As far as he was concerned, he hadn't been able to choose the person he had become, and he couldn't choose anything that grappled or choked him, or the heavived flaws and drowning situations that surrounded him-but he could at the very least choose this. Whatever it was that he was convinced from other people that hadn't quite accepted at any given age that existence was inherently remarkable, murky and slow and ultimately leading to nothing but a stagnant sameness, Bojack himself had long since learned and had come to conclusion with that the only way to accept that was rather than fighting it with trying to frantically scramble and dig up from them like the ground some sort of remarkability of existence was to be as slow and as sluggish as much as existence was itself-and as for the shittnesss that followed that feeling that was whatever cursed was embedded in human nature to natural existence and its way, leaving it tormented species; that was all apart of the process of acceptance.

"You do too," he grunted. "Let's just see where this goes and not make a big deal out of it."

He allowed himself to jolt further against her body, and her hips shuddered as he mouth opened. His intimacy of his privates were pressed against her folds so much to the point that it physically hurt, and he nodded as he looked into her with a certain warning as he felt himself thrust into the middle part of her own two legs, the low grumble of his tone reaching its pinnacle nature. His eyes rolled back againas he felt the sudden violent surge of climaxing come over his body in its all, and with a grunt and an almost impossibly treamored grunt did his voice start to pollute the air in the sudden overtaking of his clumsy grunted tones, and the only thing that grounded him was thrusting his face into her neck to keep the disgruntled sounds from spewing out and over around the area.

"Oh god-there we go," he gasped into her neck.

The swan woman herself began to shake under his touch, and she allowed him to ride into the middle part of her legs, swung around his plush muddle and the significant bloated curve of his stomach, until the cum began to climax firmly against her. His breath was coming out in hives, his skin broken into sweat.

"This the hardest you've worked in awhile?"she teased. "Don't…don't get too comfortable," he panted. His eyes turned upward, hair blotted against the space above his diamond, breathing coming out panted and desperate as his eyes winced frantically in an attempt to collect himself. "I could hear you struggling too."

Her body was now starting to ease away from his, a glint in her eyes as she turned herself away from his body, though her hands were kept on his arms, if only to keep him from falling forward.

"You know, for somebody that's completely losing his mind, you're quite the lay." Her breath was shaken in sweat, her hands pressed against bojack in insistence as her hands cramped beside his arms. "Not always what I hear from everybody else about just how desperate and clumsy you are."

His head lifted upward from where he was panting with his head drenched down in his panting. He coughed as he gave a breath of a hitch as he looked the woman over. "Do people say that?"

"Some. Here and there. When you're mentioned. You didn't know? I thought you kept up with everything."

"I don't keep up with…everything." Another pant of a breath as his body heaved downward. "Most things, maybe. Not the bad things. If I can help it."

"You should keep up with some of the bad. Might help with understanding how to navigate it."

"Yeah. Whatever. Keeping up with the bad. I'll get right on it. Not the way I've found is the best way to maintain your sanity, in my experience."

He gave another dramatic breath,plush curve of his stomach showing off how much his body was an extension of his physical chubby labor as he started to hoist himself away from her. Her eyes followed him, and slowly did she reach out to one of the pockets in her outfit. His eyes watched her as her hand trailed into a small bag as she brought it out. His eyes watched as he saw the white material that was placed within the bag as she pulled it out, eyes narrow into her focus concentration as she eased her hands against the bag.

"I promised I wouldn't show anyone. But you're a decent fuck, and I decided that I as well reward you for that."

He felt himself losing his control as he watched the bag in her fingers. "You're serious?"

"Get down her and get some good regular blow, big man."

"You-had it this whole time?"

"Don't be angry with me. I needed to keep it with me for my own personal use; it's not nearly enough that you would have paid for it. Like having one pack of gum left. Usually, no matter what goes wrong with the mainstream order, I always manage to have this thing with me regardless, because I enjoy having my own hit at the end of the day. If I don't keep at least my own bubble, god knows what will happen to the business. You wouldn't have someone to call in the middle of the insecure night in the first place." She opened up the front of the plastic bag, easing her fingertip on the front part of it-and then turned before placing it on her beak as she turned her eyes up and caught Bojack's teeth poked and eyes widened in question. "You want to have some to take the edge off? It's a tool."

"You don't need to tell me twice." He let out something that almost seemed like a shaken breath of his own emotional relief as he slammed his knees down onto the ground while she handed him the small bag, jamming his snout forward as he ripped his fingers against the bag. She let out a chuckle as her body eased back into the counter as he started to rip it open, leaning his head downward as he took his palm and eased it onto the bag, cradling the powder in his palm, then pulled it out s he eased the cocaine into his snout. He felt himself hit a hall mentally as the surge of the white of started to slam into his senses.

"Ok. Here we go. That's it. Nice and easy."

His tone was somber, almost graceful in the way he spoke in his bittersweet honeyed contentment as he closed his eyes and allowed his body to turn back as the sensation came over him. He offered her loppy, only half controlled smile as he started to see the spaces of the walls blur. "You're full of surprises, huh?"

"Easy when life makes that the only option there is."

His body swayed, and he lifted his eyes up from the counter as he started to inch his way sitting upward. "Sure. Only if you let it."

"I think you let it the most out of everyone."

"Me? I'm fine. Worst part was spending the day in the middle of this galaxy zoo for nerds."

He tried to focus on the hallway as he lifted his eyes from the counter, but the walls were spinning, and he found he couldn't concentrate. His breath was coming out laden and broken, seeing nothing but blurriness in the middle part of his eyes. The heat of the high began to overcome him, and he felt dread as he realized he was coming back to himself in a way that left little to no room for the breathing he had felt with you.

The high from smashing somebody was one that had kept him occupied from what he had been running from, but he could already feel a jaded black panic begin to overcome his senses. Bojack was far too good at chasing cheap; to the point where it was a detriment towards anything coherent being left of value by the time the period of sabotage was done. The main hall was blurred and distant as he reached his body as much as the trembling would allow from the woman that was looking up at him for all the mockery he had felt from his own self in the longest time he could remember. The idea that people carried with them that people needed to be better was really more so just an extension for people to try to feel superior and to give themselves a purpose where there was void outside of being able to cling on to the flaws and the complexity of others for them to receive to make themselves feel better, both with purpose as well as their own flaws, rather than actually from the wanting to see people be better. It was, as most things, just an extension of wanting to be able to judge and to grip on the people's issues for the sake of their own meaning as well as for the sake of trying to use themselves and human nature's natural sense for superiority.

He could feel his senses become more fogged over as he hoisted himself against her body with a slight grunt, his body curling beside hers as he eased the plush of his body beside the curves of her own.

"What are you doing?" She was out of breath as she turned her narrows heated eyes over to his, panting with a quick ease of a breath as she turned her eyes up to where Bojack was focusing on his phone screen, tapping his fingers on swiping it open as the light flared in front of his vision.

"Here," he mumbled lowly, disorintened in his focus he whipped out his phone, as much as the fog would allow him to, easing it out from his pocket as he tried to peak through the crack that had been blown into his senses. His eyes turned as he looked at her with a pointed edge of his eyes. "If you're going to try and be one of those people that are successfully trying to clamor themselves out of the world of being not special, you should at least make sure you get the process as soothingly as possible. I know the big wide world seems interesting, but believe me, there is nothing out there that is going to make you feel any better than the intimate relationships you have. Cherish them, please. For my sake." His voice lowered into an even deeper somber focus as his eyebrows turned up into a jaded scowl while he tried to ease through the functions in front of him on the camera as he struggled to find the function of the camera. "At least then I can tell myself this had a decent context of an ending."

His fingertips swiped it open and he leaned downward until the camera screen was in the frame of his vision. He leaned forward beside the shoulders of the swan woman and snapped through the front of the button as it blurred while his leaned his puffy, drug ridden and worn face beside the woman, offering a quick flash from the camera as his disgruntled sway slammed beside her, plush body turning out as he eased his body beside her own, then leaned further beside the counter as he gave a grumble and looked over at the screen of the phone in front of him.

"I wouldn't bother trying to make sense of that." Bojack's swaying and detached eyes turned up to the swan woman as she curled her body from leaning beside his, curling her body forward as she began to thread her fingertips beside the straps of her shoulder and eased it back beside her body in an attempt to readjust herself.

He squinted as he looked down at the photo he had taken. "Close enough. It'll be enough to get the temporary superficial gain that you want out of it, anyway." He paused as he gazed over at the phone screen, seeing the blurry end of their bodies as he leaned beside her shoulder. He gave a gruff mumble in an attempt to speak as he showed her the photo with a trembling hand. "Honestly, I can't even tell if it's the right person or not. But here. Here's your photo. This is what you wanted. What all those games added up to. Hope you're happy. God knows everyone else is following the same stagnant superficial games that you are. It'll never change anything but make everyone more miserable, but I gave up on finding anyone who had any sense of genuine spirit or creativity a long time ago, and I know I don't have it. So everything will stay the same as it always was." He shrugged as he placed his hand on his stomach, turning the consideration of the emotion of his eyes down as ears lowered in thought. "So we're done. Transaction completed. So you can give me the drugs later on and we'll gone from there."

She gave him a quick fluttering of her eyes as she turned to the phone, finishing pulling up her straps as he narrows eyes turned to the screen. There was a sense of jaded sarcasm to it, adding to the spiked defense of the already black surge Bojack was feeling towards his inner suffering and loathing towards the fact that people like the swan woman was the only kind of superficial person he had ever met; the only kind he could have ever been to have a hope to be seen by anyone.

"Really going to make my night, aren't you?" Her eyes were humorous and flirting by empty as she looked him over, turning her head to the phone screen beside her as she looked over the detail of them leaning together.

"As much as could be expected from the same patterns, I would say say."

She must have sensed the odd graceful exhaustion in Bojack's voice, because she eased her eyes up and looked him over with a narrow expression of understanding-at least as much as Bojack had ever experienced understanding in his long, lonely life of dissonance, disconnect, anger, bland tolerance, and at worst, genuine empty insult from both ends of each parties.

"But you don't feel that way about the woman that you came with tonight?"

"Oh." Bojack's eyes lowered in thought, dark thread of an ease of consideration coming over his eyes as the muscles on his face furrowed in concern. "That one is, uh-different."

"Different how?"

"I don't-know." Bojack closed his eyes as he turned his head to the side and away from the picking of the swan woman, ears lowered back as he turned his head over in quick paced thought. A small shrug again. "Different in the sense that I feel like if I don't preserve it, or if I acknowledge it, that somehow I'll be left with everything else that feels like this dry, muggy, black constant circling of people doing the same shit to each other over and over again and destroying one another and not even trying to be human or even knowing what that means. She feels like-something human. And after being around nothing but broken people for so long, I-" He paused as his words hitched, cutting himself off with a end of a breath of exhaust as he felt the full weight of his words; devastatingly, in this case. "-I feel like I don't know what that means. But she makes me feel like I could know what it feels like to be human again, somehow-and I don't want to lose that."

"Which is the reason why you're back here behind the counter with me, doing crack, the same as which you've always done."

"It's not a choice." Bojack's voice cracked on the last word as he turned his head to her, eyes dim as he looked her over, hooded eyelids turning over into his irreparable exhaust, ears lowered and the true extent of emotional suffering in his tone that showed off just how blunt with exhaust he was; a true and rare quality of open human suffering. "It dosen't feel like a choice falling into the pain. It dosen't feel like something I can control. I can't handle it the way it is on my own-I've never been able to, and no matter what she is or what you think you felt watching the both of us come in, I can't handle the pain raw. It dosen't get better, it gets worse, and builds as the years of your life go on, and whatever little emotional comfort the world just barely gave you, it's replaced just as quickly by time until there's nothing but an empty life and void people. Doing shit like shi, and I hate it more than I know how to express-I've always hated it. But it's what I know. It's that stagnant and mundane routine that gets me through whatever it is that you would call twenty four hours of a life."

"And what are you hanging on for, then?"

"What?" Bojack gave her a jaded bewildered gaze of his eyes, raising up his brow as he did so while he turned his head over to the side and looked her over.

"If it's all been so terrible. If people are so not worth it. What has been keeping you on here, going up and doing all these things you hate with 'people like me' all day?"

Bojack's eyes, empty and devoid in thought, flicked in front of him as his pupils kept dilated in thought. He closed his eyes as he gave a small shrug.

"I don't know. I never have." Voice somber and stoic in a rare and even way, even despite the chaos of that of which surrounded his vision. "Maybe it would have something to do with just waiting for something to take me out by nature."

"At least you gave me a little bit of something. Going around and giving miserable and seedy men like you a little it of an underhand of a something every time you call isn't as easy as it would seem."

"Just like how you saved me from almost being a healthy one tonight, sure."

"An eye for an eye around here. Whatever makes either of us comfortable with the usual way things are around us. This is a lot easier than the alternative."

"Of what? Of the alternative of trying something different?"

The swan woman's features treamored in a slight reaction, and although she kept herself under control to at least some degree, he could see how she was stricken to some extent.

"It's not as if you took the choice to try something different anyway. You cerintely don't seem as if you were interested in doing as much tonight."

He took a breath as he looked into her. His eyes darted into a void of exhust, pupils turning in front of him in dry thought, and then settled for turning his eyes down as he allowed that familiar black worthlessness to flow over him.

"Sure," he said bluntly after a moment. "Yeah, I did. Because I don't think there's any point of going forward from here. Of improving. No one needs that garbage. Never did anyone any good."

"Strange thing for someone to say, all things considered, considering the way you've been talking about that woman tonight."

"Yeah." Bojack gave a bittersweet breath, laughing lightly as he did so. "I guess I would be more interested in doing it if I thought it was a thing."

"And it's not?"

"No. At least, I don't think so. It's just logic, really."

"You sound confident."

"I've met a lot of people, being famous. Rich, poor, misfortunate, the exciting." He winced in aged thought, turning his eyes down in consideration as the the muscles on his face treamored into a tired thought, wrinkles on his face turning across under sleep ridden eyes; a certain consideration only Bojack carried. "They all have this, uh-mood to them, in a sense. A feeling that they're just wrecking themselves around from this far larger, more terrible truth of whatever it is that's waiting on the other side of whatever it is they're concerning themselves with currently. But I feel it and I see it in everyone; this large, exanseive void on the other side of whatever it is these people are doing to distract themselves."

"Distract themselves?" The swan woman laughed, vague warmth in her tone that came along with teasing amusement. "From what?"

Bojack paused in thought, then gave a slight rasped breath and a shrug of his shoulders.

"Exactly. I don't know. And you think the not knowing or being able to describe it part would make it easier-but, it doesn't at all."

"Well, you come around to the right corner if you feel like we're done with this part," she insisted as her feathered hands started to press against her other phone to send from the photo Bojack had given her. He felt a shivered heat start to overcome him as he felt the way her enclosed fingertip sealed the transaction to unapologetic degree while he heard the phones buzzing in their transfer.

"This will make a story for everybody that comes in here for the next couple of nights. Can't say that I won't get something out of it."

"Of course you will. The more superficial, the more believable the transaction. The more people will care or concern themselves with it."

"And you're unhappy with that." It wasn't a question as a much as it was a blunt tone of a word, her eyes narrow and blunt as she kept her focus on the phones while her eyes switched between them.

"It dosen't matter if I'm unhappy with it. It never has. Believe me, the world decided to make that very clear a long time ago that it's just the way the world is. I've tried to become a part of it, I thought I wanted to for a long time more than anything. But it has nothing to do with any of it. Whatever it is that I want inside of me, whatever this world is doing or what it will keep doing when I'm gone, whether I destroy myself to be apart of it, it doesn't matter. I just know that the world is going to be what it is, and I'm either irrelevant or miserable for the rest of my life not being apart of it. That's all there is. That's all there ever has been."

"Figures." The swan woman began to ease her slender body up from behind the counter, eyes narrowed and turned to the phones beside her as she kept her hands on them screen to finish the last transaction, then pressed her fingertips beside the send button as the sound eased away the rest of the transaction.

Bojack's eyes were as dry as his somber blunt tone as he spoke; "Figures what?"

"I should have given you more crack to help take off the edge of that literal weight you have going on. That way you could have left just feeling full of gratitude for the fact that we had this exchange until the real thing once I get the fresh crack."

Bojack's eyes winced into a flair as he watched her stand herself upright, and Bojack felt that black manic disapproval in his eyes as his hard expression followed her while she stood behind the counter, then placed one phone in front of her, the other beside the computer. Bojack began to trip over himself while he grunted as his hands started to frantically splay against the side of his hips and the disgruntled and disarrayed part of his pants while it met beside his shirt, panting as he squeezed inward and tried to keep the muddled and wrecking edge of his emotion as controlled as much as he was able.

"Well, I'll tell you one thing. You did take the edge off, otherwise I wouldn't have taken that without a lot of petty jabbing to try and even out the annoyance."

"Good." The swan seemed as if she was in full robot mode again, tapping her fingertips beside the keyboard as her eyes narrowed down while she began to set up a ticket transaction for the upcoming rhino couples, the both of the dressed in bustled red and plush bodies that executed comfort as they walked their way forward. The swan indicated her eyes to the phone. "Your phone is right there. Take it whenever you want. I think we both got what we wanted out of the night.""

"Don't expect anything out of this. From me, I mean, outside of the order of crack. If I hear from you again after this, I'm going to make sure you can't reach me again. As far as I'm concerned, this is over. I don't want to hear from you, reach out to you, or hear you complain about tonight, or ask for more than what I gave you." He let out one last grunt as he jolted his body further into the spaces of where one side of his buckle met the other, placing it into the hole, then solidified it with one click against the edge of the metal while he finished easing his pants up to his hips. "Got it?"

"Wouldn't expect anything less from someone who's known for being a flank and run," she said with an almost dismissive tone as she started to kick her legs from behind the counter as stepped of the last of the bits of the scattered papers, notebooks, and of other supplies that had fallen off of the counter while Bojack had slammed himself against her for momentarily relief as he had felt her twist under his body for the brief moment of their own stagnant distraction. Her heels kicked coldly back to the floor and robotic focus towards the computer, her slender below caressing her slick and black eyes as began to focus with a familiar stagnant bored expressions she gave a small word to the couple beginning to walk forward, clicking listlessly with her finger.

He froze as he continued to tremble his hands beside his crumpled and distressed shirt, eyes turning up in wide bulged panic as he watched the couple walk forward, as if there as a specific narrative of his own person guilt that was for them to read and care about, just as he had alays felt like his every minute fear and personal horrified narratives were read by others as much as it felt to him; and the worst part, more often than not had people made it known that they did feel as such.

He paused as he stared at her. Her eyes trialed over to him from the side of her eyes that seemed to have an attempt of being dismissive glinted in the same judgemental and cold expression of what they bore from their hungry lust so easily earlier, so different from what he had become accustomed to with you-even if only on a subconscious level.

"Did you feel it?"

"Feel what?" The swan' woman's voice was cold now, but the performative built in warmth erased into her face as she turned her head up as spoke warmly to where the rhino man and his wife were walking to the front of the counter, both of them adorned in red as they welcomed themselves to the woman kindly.

"The mood." Bojack's expression treated in a firm, cautious insistence as he looked her over. "The mood you were talking about when you saw myself and my current 'woman' walk in?" You seemed pretty insistence about it earlier."

The swan's expression neither confirmed or denied Bojack's persistence; her expression seemed to have taken on an attempt at stoic indifference as she kept her focus on the keyboard beside her. Her eyes flicked up as she gave the rhino couple beside her a raise of her smile, narrow eyes turning as she looked between them in welcome.

"Are the both of you prepaid today?"

"Paid online. About a few hours before." The rhino husband's voice was low ad stoic in his tone, and his black eyes turned over to Bojack. A small smile grazed under his tusk. "Getting assistance from some of the people who paid to come in today?"

"He was just leaving. Doing a little bit of small talk here and there."

Bojack felt his aggravation getting the worst of him; his fingers scratched abruptly beside his cheek as he felt his eyes hollow, his other hand coming to sweep through the disarray of his mane as he gazed at her with his expression tense and furrowed while he watched her get further into the mundanity of the transaction.

"Always good to have a little bit of help. Nothing is happening in life, really, just the things people say. Lovely that you found someone who wanted to share such a thing with you today." The rhino wife sounded more fragile, older, and delicate. Bojack continued to scratch the side of his cheek as his expression furrowed into a tense and frantic thought. His hard eyes turned to the swan woman as he gripped the side of her arm; her eyes flashed as she looked over at him with a ask of insistence in her eyes as she tensed while she snapped her arm from where Bojack was reaching out his hand to get her attention.

"Hey, I'm serious." He gave a protest of a breath as his expression furrowed as he tried to reach for her arm again, but the swan seemed as if she had made a decision to keep curled into herself n her cold professionalism. He snapped his eyes upward as he gave a protest if a conflicted breath when she snapped her shoulder away from his palm. "Can you at least try to tell me what you did or didn't feel when you were-with me?"

"The tickets will be printing in a moment." The swan's voice seemed pointed in her insistence as she gave a quick strained smile to the couple in front of her. Bojack's eyes hardened as he looked over the rhino couple, ears flown back.

"Are you really doing this?"

"We did what we did, Bojack." The swan turned her eyes back to the keyboard again, tapping her fingertips beside the keyboard as the sound of the machine beside her began to buzz with the ticket as it started to print out.

"I know-but what you said. You don't think it's not unusual for me to want to know, at all?"

"You were the one who was denying any sense of spirituality."

"Please. I'm Bojack. I deny everything."

The swan woman turned to where the ticket was being spewed out. She leaned her body beside the counter, placing the ticker in front of her as she reached for a pen, leaning down as she began to scramble the pen beside the lines.

"Hey, stop with the admiration for a second." Bojack's hand gripped the swan woman's arm and she tensed as she gave a quick breath of insult at his grasp; but Bojack could feel the forgiving edge of the cocaine as he gave her his puffy eyed wince as his dark eyed flared as she was forced to raise her attention from the tag. Her body twisted as she raised her body up and gazed at him with a flair. "Can you at least give me some clarity on what the hell happened when you said all that?"

The swan woman gave a small sharp breath of protest as she tried her best to get herself outside a Bojack's grasp, but he kept letting out his own soft swears of insistence as he looked over her with his eyes hardened and with his expression begging with insistence. The swan woman turned her head away from the customers for a moment, as if attempting to collect herself in the middle of her confliction and of Bojack's desperate intensity, and she raised her head over towards the rhino couple that was behind the counter for what seemed like a moment of an attempt of recollection. She gave them a quick, tentative raise of a smile as she did as she looked over them and she tried her best to be able to reassure them; though Bojack could tell it was more for her own sanity than for the nature of order.

"Just a moment," she said as she reassured them in the best even tone she could manage. She tried her best to slip outside of BoJack's grasp, but he still tugged her by him gain with a soft swear, if only for the sake of trying his best to have sense of control over his fear in regards to the question.

He didn't bother to keep that red flair outside of his eyes, looking particularly insistent up against the exhaustion of the rotation of the age of his features. She swallowed slightly, as if she was trying her best to be able to swallow some sort of concept or emotion that was haunting the topic. She turned her head back over towards Bojack, giving a breath that she did so, recollecting herself from the professional robot detachment she had as she met Bojack's insistence.

"No-"

Bojack gave a slight protest as he squeezed his hand beside her arm when she tried to pull away. She closed her eyes as she turned her head to the side, lowering it downward in what seemed like odd ends of a defeat; Bojack followed her lead as he turned away from the muttering couple, and his grasp began to loosen up against the side of her arm as he felt the way her body leaned up against the side of the counter in her own defeat for Bojack's insistence. He still kept his eyes tense as he looked her over in that concerned, graceful, demanding fashion the way that he had a natural way of being able to have. She turned her head back, slender neck following the tension of her focus as she gave him a slight breath and a dry swallow in his direction, her eyes closing in thought while the wrinkles set under her eyes.

"I don't know if I was meant to be able to feel it. I don't think that I'm supposed to. I think that I wanted to, but I didn't understand it when it came. I certainly didn't understand it when I began to experience it, and I think that there might be a reason for that." The muscles on her face treamored again as she swallowed, showing off her age,."I think its the way that it should be."

"What are you talking about? The way that it should be?"

Bojack's expression kept hard in his questioning, though his palm began to detach away from the swan's arm. When she didn't respond but instead kept swaying beside the counter, her eyes closed as she kept her hands gripped beside it for the sake of her leverage, Bojack could feel his disgust and his natural impatience towards that which was unpleasant increasing.

"You better not be trying to be able to tap dance around this for the sake of trying to be able to keep something to yourself for whatever weird reason, because I can promise you that with the way that the circles just go around in the city and in the world in general because evidently no one has anything better to do, I'll probably end up figuring it out for myself eventually. And I can promise you that with just how much of a pain it is to have to tell me now, it'll probably be to the detriment of the both of us if you're not just open it up front about it in the first place."

"No one will talk about it, Bojack. It's not like that. It's not something tangible."

The swan's voice was jaded and pointed as she snapped her head to the side to Bojack for a moment,her body still swaying in a tilt of a weight that seemed like she was attempting to carry just from the context of the conversation.

"I don't want to talk about it."

She closed her eyes, as if to recollect herself; as she did so, a slight breath left her lips, and she closed her eyes again as he body continued to sway in something that didn't seem unlike sickness. Bojack gave an abrupt and impatient roll of his eyes and a swear, eyes rolling up while his hand while his hand behan to rest beside his wrist instead of her arm, but the impatience and tension didn't leave his expression as he gazed at her with intense impatience.

"Bullshit. Don't give me that. You were the one that was practically grabbing at me and looking at me with those big doughy, watery looking eyes as if you thought your life was dependent on it, and with the way that you're acting, I would have been surprised if that ended up being the case."

"Forget it, Bojack."

"And now you're trying to say that you want to just be able to 'shut it down' and like you don't want to talk about it and it doesn't matter? After all those theatrics,, you can at least follow through with this."

"I wasn't expecting it to feel the way." She snapped her head over to Bojack's direction as she spoke the words with defiant venom, and there was a fire in her eyes as her eyes opened for a slit of an exhaustive moment. She didn't both to look back up to Bojack directl' something inside of her that seemed as if it was trying to hide in contrast to the way that she practically been spilling herself onto him a moment before. Bojack stepped backward a bit at the force of the way that she spoke it-but collected himself just a s quickly; his insecurity under his desperation questioning of what she had felt was possessing his violent impatience.

"What do you mean 'didn't expect to feel that way?" It was just an emotion, one of those corny intuition things that woman are always going on about, right? Nothing that actually would have had any kind of genuine grounding in reality or something you actually have to worry about defining you in any kind of way. At least, that was certainly the way that you wanted to be able to describe it when you told me about it, like it was some sort of goddamn transaction of emotions that you could just wrap around you if you wanted, and for the sake of both of our sanity, I decided to take it on my shoulder and to go along with it. I would like it if you try to be at the very least keep with that now."

"It was like nothing else-but I felt it for a moment, or, I thought that I did. I didn't want to, it was right around when your lips kissed me and I felt the way that you were pressing up against me with the passion-or at least, we wanted to be, and I could feel only the want, not the real thing. There was no energy from my end; but it was beautiful, the fleeing moment of what I knew I saw in the both of you from the start."

She paused for a moment as she turned her neck back up again while she continued to breath heavily in the middle of her consideration, the wear and wrinkle on her features still tracing beside her heavy breaths that spoke of a sickness; so different from the robot way she seemed to be holding her own a moment before, but with the way she was unraveling now, it wasn't hard to see as to why she had taken that routine.

"I'd like us to stop talking now." The swan readjusted her hips from the counter as she raised herself upward, eyes fluttering down quickly as if she were meant to try and reground herself.

"What?" Bojack's eyes flared as he gave her a glare, and his hand reached out and snapped beside her arm again. The swan woman paused just as she was about to turn to the counter, but she tensed as her eyes fluttered down while her body squimred under the grasp of his touch. "No. How hard is it for you to tell me how it felt or not? What happened?"

"I couldn't handle it." The swan's words came out in a sudden abrupt and quick insistence as she snapped her head over to Bojack's direction, voice breathy and full of her heated confliction.

Bojack's eyes flew over her body as he looked her over. "What?"

"I couldn't handle it. When you kissed me, I felt this overpass of life coming over me; this large, vast, expansive entire beautiful romantic light that have me a moment to see into it and have it thrash and pass over me. I could have made i t mine, there was a moment where I could gave gone into it in it's entirely. I felt-" She paused as her neck lowered down, eyes fluttered in her frantic thought . Her eyes fluttered down to the keyboard as her fingertips paused beside the keyboard. Bojack's hand detached fro her arm again as his tentative eyes flashed across her body, expression furrowing as he gazed at her with a paused pout.

"It's ok. I want to know."

"There is nothing to know." The swan woman laughed lightly as her eyes fluttered to his, almost bashfully, red cheesl dusting beside her features as her head kept turned down by the keyboard. "I just-couldn't handle it, is all. I thought I could, when I sensed it. It was far better that I didn't."

"What are you talking about?"

"Sorry about that." The swan's smile curved into a content guiding as she looked between the couple beside her. "Can I finish the transaction for the both of you?"

Bojack opened up his mouth for a protest; and then felt a defeat overcome him while she began to fully talk into the conversation of the richer rhino couple beside her while the three feel into mundane talk of transaction.

He sighed as he watched her slender hands gripping beside the tickets while the guidning of her words to the couple in front of her fell into a foggy and muddled backdrop in the middle of Bojack's overprocessed discomfort. Bojack's concerned eyes followed as he watched the muscles in her hand tense in between the talk with the couple that would suggest a detrimental amount of tension; her fingers gripping in front of the counter with an almost impatient tension as her body turned back and forth in the middle of her swaying tension that came with the transaction.

"Hey." Bojack cut through the fogginess of his disconnect as he reached out a hadn and this time simply caressed his fingers beside her arms. She paused in the middle of her small talk with the rhinos; her narrow eyes turning down while she paused an d looked at Bojack's hands that were easing beside her arms. Though she tensed under his touch, she did give leaveway for permission for Bojack to continue speaking while his fingertips threaded beside her arms with concern.

"If you can elaborate without any code or trying to fog or cover things up for the way they are, maybe the both of us can come to terms with what happened." The swan woman tugged herself away, but Bojack gave an abrupt rasp of protest as he gripped his hand beside her arms this time and pressed her back. "I'm serious. Tell me this isn't something I need to worry about. Please." His voice became alost begging now, threading up into the detriment of his voice as it trembled in insistence. "I already have a lot to worry about with that woman enough as it is. I'm just asking for a little clarity, that's all."

"It wasn't meant for me." The swan tugged her arm away from Bojack with another snap of insistence, and this time Bojack let go as he gave an abrupt breath, expression furrowing with tension as he allowed his grasp to fall away from easing onto the woman's arm. Her eyes narrowed as she turned her expression down, rolling her shoulders as a tension of shame overcame her features. "Whatever it was that I felt, it was too much for me. Beautiful, from a distance. I thought I wanted it; more than anything when I felt it come in. Like an introduction to how life should be-could have been for me, if-" Her eyes fluttered to the rhino couple beside her, eyes lowered in thought. The rhino turned his head over to the swan in the middle of his lumbered conversation with his wife, and something that seemed full of tension came over his expression as the muscles on his face tensed while he turned his head up with a sudden blank tension that came over his features. The swan kept her features low, tone just as much, as she turned her head downward.

"- And if I tried to force it to be able to make it for me, it would have only made it worse-whatever it was that I experienced or whatever or it was that was using itself and demeaning that I shouldn't have tried to make it my own."

Bojack paused for a minute, hitching up into a small breath of a bewildered whimper as he heard her words.

"What was it that felt so-terrible?"

"It wasn't terrible, that's the thing." The swan's eyes narrowed as she kept her eyes down while she turned her head to the side, though she didn't turn her eyes up to look at Bojack directly. "It was beautiful-profoundly beautiful, terrible, more than I ever could have believed or understood. It was the beauty to destroyed me-the fact that I've spent an entire lifetime not knowing how beautiful it was, and if I had, I never would have been able to ignore it, or do anything I did in its absence."

Bojack's eyes turned down in thought; a genuine authentic, almost tender look of his own genuine desperation overcame him as he stepped forward.

"What would you call it, if you could?"

He paused when she only kept her head turned away from Bojack while her fingertips continued to grip beside the edge of the counter, the muscles of her face trembling in conflict. Despite how she was clearly trying to keep herself put together, it was all in the physicality of the muscles of her face of how she was the physical embodiment of the way that she was tormented. Bojack's eyes were lowered into his own soft exasperation as he watched the conflict in her eyes and face-more than his insecurity now was he feeling a sense of blunt frustration.-though he couldn't deny the way that he felt a sense of increased dread that had come over him the second he had mentioned it, just as she had had that look of maddening desperate exhaust in her eyes when she had taken the wrist of his hand, glint of desperation in her eyes and the thread of her emotion trembling in a desperate question.

"I know that this seems hard for you. The more honest you are, the more that we can both come to clarity and the more that we can both move on from this. You understand?"

His voice was low, tender in his resolve of attempting to convince her; ears lowered and palms tense beside his chest.

"Bojack."

His name was spoken by a trembling and aged voice; delicate, and yet there was an edge to it. Bojack's eyes widened and his ears perked up; his head turned over t the rhino couple. The rhino man's wife was curled inside of herself; she seemed older in her wrinkles and the drenched clothes of the royal red of her dress. She seemed bewildered, her eyes fogged but looking over him with a remarkable detriment of cerritnety.

"Yes. You did seem me in that television show once, thank you."

Bojack's voice was as blunt and dismissive as much as it had ever been as he turned his eyes back to the swan, opening his mouth timidly to say another word; before he could speak, there was a sudden slam of the weight of the wife's hands beside the counter. Bojack abruptly jolted up, ears flown back as he snapped his had over to where the wife was abruptly beginning to maddeningly grip her hands beside the counter, her expressions scowled into something that was painted as violent excitement.

"Oh-" Bojack's hands flew in front of him as his ears flew back, expression winced as he watched the way she began to slam her body and scramble beside the counter. Bojack gave a grimance as he watched her; her body was beginning to erratically spasm against the side of the counter , eyes spewed out into a maddening degree, her aged hands gripping and slamming beside the counter.

"Hey!" Bojack winced as he is body turned into itself, one leg coming to raise up beside his chest as his ears flew bac. The husband eased out his hands as one arm came behind her shoulders to fly across her body, the other coming to grip beside her wrist; she had an animalistic maddening red to her as she continued to thrash beside the counter, her eyes light with a maddening red of her own fighting fury.

"Stop it." Tbe rhino beside his wife gripped his hands firmly beside her wrist, her face still eased into a scowl of her own gripped and wrinkled fury, and the rhino kept his hand grasped beside his wife even as she kept in furious tension while she gazed at Bojack with the red heat of glint in her eyes. Though she breathed heavily, her body eased back with a slam beside her husband's grasp, stout legs easing back beside her husband's embrace as her stout body turned forward, though the wrinkled grimace and the light of fury in her eyes, an animalistic cage of desire, didn't leave the twist of her expression.

"What is it with her?" Bojack's body was still turned into his tentative cramp, but the light in his eyes began to turn into something more pitying and somber as his body began to release his tension while he watched her husband talk her down; though the maddening look in her eyes didn't decrease as she kept herself flying over to Bojack now and then with the labor of her dry breath scratching beside where her fury had been with the black anger in her disposition moment before. The rhino man kept his hands gripped beside her wrists as he continued to talk to her in a low, mumbled down; his gray and wrinkled knuckles were turned stark white in the midst of the way he had his grasp snapped beside her wrists. Her red edge of her eyes were small and dilated, crazed as she snapped her eyes to Bojack and then to the swan;, breathing coming out labored and panicked. The husband finished talking to her in that low, stern tone, and this wife settled for turning her head forward while the front of her face eased beside the front of his own panting chest. The rhino turned his head up to Bojack and yourself , his fingers sternly gripped beside his wife's wrists as her labored breath pressed beside the rhino man's cest, turning her head away now entirely,though Bojack could still sense how her tone was scratched in her throat with that maddening haunted look of what seemed like an edge desperation.

"What is your wife's problem?" Bojack's expression was furrowed in a barley masked concern as he turned the hard look of his eyes over to the husband. His eyes looked over Bojack for a moment, eyes dark with an emotion that made the almond of his eyes seem particularly full of an extent of depth as he gazed over at Bojack's disposition.

"You don't look the way they say you do. Even less do you feel the way that I was coming to anticipate. Mostly just of drenched, rotten spoiled long term despair more than anything else-and people love the leverage mirror of what they are. Even to their detriment."

Bojack didn't find words to say anything; what he wanted was to speak a sharp, judgemental, quick witty word to tell him he was crazy and to not make it his problem. With any usual nonsense that would have been presented to him from others, that was what he would have done, without second thought.

But the husband's eyes had something ancient in them, or rather the awareness of something ancient, dispairing and with a deep hallowed depth that seemed to come from philosophy and observation and the compact of a rich enticement of observation that made up the look of what seemed like ominous attack and an edge of judgment that seemed years deep or longer, and Bojack felt the words on his mouth, usually impulsively wrought for the sake of his own panicked and desperate peace of mind, fall into what was instead a pause of his own frozen insight into the chilling look of the husband's eyes that seemed drenched in a wordless lifetime of someone's inner knowledge.

"Good seeing you, Horseman." The husband took the orange ticket that was lying on the counter, grimacing as he crumpled it in his hand, and his head turned curtly to the swan, who'sbody was now entirely enfurled into herself, her hand gripped beside her arm as she turned her eyes down, as if weighed down by the look of the husband's eyes as much as Bojack could feel the strain of it. "It's good to see something that is causing so much trouble in it's full mundanity, at least for the quiet amount of time that we have it."

"Go to hell." The wife's voice abruptly spewed out a tension of anger as she managed to ease her harrowed face from the counter, spitting her voice out to Bojack, and as he caught a glimpse of her eyes, he could see the red edge of her madness. Bojack's ears perked up as his hand raised in front of him as he watched the venom of her tone. The husband took to mumbling something to her again, and then squeezed his white hot knuckles beside her wrists when she seemed to have a slight spasm in protest. The husband wrinkled his palms into his ticket, curling it beside his palm as he looked, with a slight more causal air, to the swan as he gave her a nod.

"Keep it under the guise as much as you're able. And don't try and make it your own. You'll destroy yourself from the inside out pursuing what isn't made for you."

The swan didn't look up, only kept her eyes lowered, and as Bojack turned his head to her, he saw how her head was tilted down under the weight of something unseen.

"I know." She eased her head up a few inches, offering the husband a nod. "I shouldn't have."

"As long as you know." The rhino eased his body away from the edge; and as Bojack watched him, expression tensed and the muscles on his face eased into a tremble of a tentative caution, he felt the rhino look at him as if time were slowed; his eyes flashed as he looked over at Bojack with a pointed, black almond glint of a hard flair, and he turned as he began to walk past the counter where Bojack was, not turning the black look of his eyes away from Bojack as he began to help his wife though the open area. The wife took to allowing her much more stout, short body to have her hands enclasped by her husband, though as the husband began to detach that hollowing eyes away from Bojack and turned to the large archway, the wife's eyes, hard and insistent, turned to Bojack as her expression was tense into a scowled hatred; Bojack felt the vulnerability of his unknowing following her as he kept his hands ease beside his chest, ears lowered as he felt the vulnerability of his expression following the scowl of her features.

"The entire point of life is to find a center of calm where no matter what happens, nothing really ruins the center of sense of peace with yourself, and you see it as a natural way of how things are rather than devastation, and learn that your psychology is weak and flawed and not real so as to not let your emotions define you. Be entirely free no matter what happens, and nothing can ever truly destroyed you."

Bojack's eyes were still kept firmly on the wife as she tripped over her feet to follow her husband; that haunting chill and extent of that haunting scowl on her features burned in his memory. He blinked rapidly at the words of the swan; his teeth poked as he blinked rapidly, then turned his fearful eyes over to where the swan was turning her eyes to the ticker machine again. She had collected herself well enough, slender white body attempting to be at least somewhat upright as she turned her body back to the machine and began to mess with it.

He caught his breath in the middle of his tension, felt himself inwardly suffocating his belief in the detriment of the effect the couple had had by looking at him; to the side, before Bojack fully gave the swan his attention again and before he could talk himself out of believing it in its entirety, he turned as his eyes caught what seemed like the same hollowed and stuck out bones of shapened corpses and hollowed black eyes and even wider desperate mouths, as haunting as they came. Their bodies were slunk forward, bones jolting and their necks snapped in front of them, arms twisted in front of them, nothing but dust and bone.

One of them turned their head a few inches to the side just as the hollow of their definitive emptiness turned through the expanse of the hallway, one having its head crack beside the bones of its neck as the hollowed human more inhuman than anything turned, bones creaking and sticking out from its neck; the deep carven wrinkles of what seemed like a void of a person, demented in their black of less than nothing and the punishment of want to be more than god outside of that, treamoring across their shrunken and inhuman devoid features, and Bojack felt the deepest black come over him even as their sight and perception of himself; the blackest of the deep void of the isolation and punishment of the most detrimental extent of being devoid of being human, black loathing and complete deprivation of the most inhuman isolated crippling despair.

Bojack paused as he shook his head frantically, teeth poked as he gave an abrupt breath while he tried to fight through the murky fog of his fight from the preception of the heavy hollow people.

The crack was, just as the swan had intended, doing its rightful wonder across his prepception; though the emotions he received from the people was just as black and as disparing as it had been when he had encountered them the first time, the edge of the much more demanding side effects of the crack caused him a separation from the illusions he saw, an acceptance of the surreral while having a detachment from them entirely in their presence; in the blur of the crack's affects and of the disorienting sensation of his perception of being affected by the way the rhino man had looked at him with that definitive empty stare, Bojack felt as if he were an accepting part of the black, rather than in fear of it. The stupidity of the surrerality of the crack was leveraging him to an expansive degree of simply being; and he felt a complete release of any sense of ego or pride or attachment to his understanding of the physical nature as he was.

He gave a hitch as his ears lowered while he turned the timid glint of his eyes to the swan woman. She was readjusting the rest of the files from under the cashier space, seeming to become more settled now into her robotic and natural nature of fucntioning through the choas with a blant energy rahter than to fight it.

"Is that what people say?"

She gave a slender shrug, white fingertips passsing through some unprinted tickets that were being flashed through her hands. "That's what the woman you're with said." Her eyes turned up in thought, clearly attemping to be casual despite the clear weight in her air with everything she was reccollecting herself from. "That was what it seemed to be for the breif moment I got an insight into what she must have told you, anyway."

His eyebrows raised up as he considered what she suggested.

"You know she said that?"

The swan gave a raise of her brow and a smirk as she looked Bojack over.

"So she is as insightful as much as those sad eyes would communciate."

"She told me…a few nights ago. I was sitting with her in bed-or, rather, lying-and she turned to me and she said that. It gave me peace-for a moment, anyway." He winced as he thought over what the swan wa sugegsting from having that kind of inisight for a momet, eyes turning into a squint of thought. "Is that one of the things you felt that you felt was too much for you when everthing 'opened up' for you while we were…fracking?"

"It just came over me. And I knew it didn't come from me. Small bubbles of the love you share, of the wisdom you might acribe and insire out of one another-like small potholes of blessings and persoetive."

"It's no…love." Bojack gave an abrupt protest as his worried, naturally clumsy and conflicted eyes turned over the counter while he frantically tried to see through his blurred vision as much as he was able where the creatures had been. Their hallowed bodies, much like the rhino couple, was long gone. "She's just some woman that I'm sleeping with."

"That's not the way it felt to me. And I've no motive to try and say otherwise."

"That dosen't mean it means what you think it does." Bojack raised a brow as he turned his eyes back to the swan, who only gave a slight curve of her smile and a nod as she finished the task of collecting the paper.

"It came to me. I felt it-but it wasn't to me. I just heard the words spoken, and it was dedicated to yourself-and the warmth of it was like nothing else."

As he went over every action and thought that churned in his mind, he found his mind came to the conclusion that wasn't surprising, but was nonetheless still just as oddly defining and crushing as much as any unwanted and aggressive inner tormented narrative thought towards himself or existence had ever been;

"No. That dosen't make sense. We're both just on crack. There's nothing special about that woman, or anything we share. And everything I've seen tonight is-" He paused as he gave an abrupt breath, rolling his shoulders as he turned his eyes down in tentative thought. "-Just my dumb brain making things up again for the sake of terrifying me, as always."

"And what about the couple?"

"Rich people are crazy. I've known that my entire life." He pouted in thought for a moment as the swan woman gave a slight low mumble of laughter; mumbled in agreement, but tired. Bojack's eyes winced as he turned his head up and looked at her in question. "Why, do you know what it is about them?"

The swan paused in the middle of opening up a cashier drawer, her narrow eyes eased down as she looked at the various mundanity of the supplies in front of her. Her eyes flashed, an unreadable emotion threaded within them.

"I think you should go now."

"Really?"

"I'll send you the drugs you ordered. They'll arrive in a couple of days-maybe a week, depending on how long it takes to get the bad stuff out."

The swan paused as she reached out her hands and threaded it beside the drawer, head turned down as she fluttered her eyes and closed them for a moment. Bojack's head turned to the side, insecurity eased into the flair of his deep tormented insecurity. But he settled as he began to step his way back and around the counter. His expression turned back to the swan as he saw her eyes closed, wrinkles puffed and showing off her true troublement.

"Look, I know that this entire thing was just a superficial and quick transaction at best, but-are you ok?"

The swan woman's eyes opened at Bojack's tentative words. Her head titled up as she turned her head up and curved her eyes to him-and then, with a bitter raise of her lip that seemed like it was opened into an expansion of something too human and beautiful for the hopeless suffocation of the atmosphere that had surrounded her and always would did she simple speak;

"Thank you, Bojack."

Bojack's eyes turned away from the swan, threaded into a frantic uncerintiy.

"Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You too."

He turned his stout body around the counter, fingertips playing beside his wrist as his ears lowered in thought. He turned to face her, feeling an odd hollowed guilt unlike anything he had felt before; he had treated woman terribly plenty of times and had felt bad about it, but this guilt felt like it was eating him from the inside out; an expansive and universal form of some grieving universal life.

"Thank you for-your time. It helps. Really. I know it must not be easy serving people like me where there's nothing but bad but-thank you."

The swan said nothing; already was she beginning to turn into what was her natural stance of a robotic nature as she busied herself behind the counter with the continuous mundane tasks.

Bojack's eyes darted down in a wet resolve, then gave a slight roll of his shoulders and a deep reset of a breath. He let out a grunt as he started to clumsily press his hands against the counter, starting to jumble his way outward as he took in a breath to make his way back out to the hallway.

"Just so we're clear, I was amazing just now in this hook up we did. And if you ever talk to anyone about it, I was the best sex you ever had, and the most interesting conversationalist. Don't say, suggest, or try anything else. And if anyone else ever comes around and tries to tell you another story about what it's actually like to me around me-" He waved his hands in a exasperated, circular motion as his eyes raised upward in an eye rolling flare- "Just lie for me. You know how it is with me."

"Worried about how this will affect the few people who still care to define themselves with your reputation," she spoke, amusement lacing her voice that made Bojack feel at least the vague sense of the slightly more forgiving amusement to dissipate the tension of the larger pain.

"Right up there with the rest of your three or so Instagram followers that'll make you feel good by yourself tonight. Whatever keeps things fresh and interesting. For both of us."

She turned her head backward, clearly taken aback by his shot at her; though in the wake of the ominous harrowing pain of which had been dealt, it seemed like child's play in comparison to the something beyond understanding both of them had felt that night.

"Look at you," she muttered. "Sharper tongue than I'd think.

"Apparently everything is sharper than you remember. Including how backward deals work."

He didn't bother worrying about going too far with the jaded and edged flair out of his voice and attempt of trying to lighting the conclusion of the tense interaction- he was too occupied with a sudden feeling of the fact that he had, in fact, completely lost, or at the very least deeply damaged, some part of him that had just started to grow in the wake of whatever it was that had been flowering between the intimacy of the times he allowed himself to be that soft lover the past few weeks with you-the strange sense of a precious irreplaceable golden tint of endless and functional nourishment that made him not only feel a certainty that he was in love, but that he was safe in the same sense that it almost made him feel a certain unwillingly reality to lose you. And yet he had cheated, and he had done drugs tonight, rather than to dedicate himself to you; an impossibility Bojack wasn't even sure he believed in for himself. No matter what else had occurred between himself and the swan tonight, the bare matter of the fact was that that was what had occurred.

He had been in love before, but it had only been with the most superficial attachment and desperate narrative, and even less with any sense of eugene reasoning for why it worked, much less any spiritual relief.

The fact of the manner was, what he had cultivated with you, whatever it was and in whatever way it came with, had the strange sense that he knew for a fact he would be worse off without it, and that was enough to make the black pit in his stomach not only drop, but to leave his senses entirely of even taking in its full acceptance of the fact that he could be the center core of something quality, pure, human-something he had felt denied and unworthy of his entire life, and confirmed to by the superficial jokester world in kind.

He couldn't say that he felt brave enough to confide in you about cheating as his eyes turned away from the swan, who hadn't responded positively or negatively to his last remark; there was an understanding between the two of them that they had understood what had happened tonight, and the empty jaded teasing was too feeble fools' attempt at minimizing damage.

Bojack turned his head over to the swan, as if he could have levered himself from the detrimental hesitance he felt from the build up of what he had taken in; but the teasing and push of the two of them had already come to a quiet close, suffocated and without conclusion, though still entirely tired, the swan taking to turning back to her computer as she readjusted her body and took her stoic place in front of the screen.

The chaos was home to Bojack; it was all home to him, even and especially because of how much he knew it would keep him in that shell of sickness, and even with the black regret and the waves of uncurling in his black exhaust did he feel a sense of completetion, and any perspective out of that seemed wrong. The conversation, right along with the almost pathetically predictable impulsive sex, started to etch into his memory of what he wanted for the night, a sense of leverage above what he was perceiving that night, as he started to rush his way down the hallway. He pressed both hands against his neck as he tried to prevent the sweating that was now breaking out in response to the black out spots on the edge of his vision, breath heavy laden and unforgiving, tensesly aligned with the back and forth of his impulsive narrative.

He was trying to keep his breathing controlled as even as he made his way through the hallway, seeing the blurred vision of the double motion of the walls overtaking his vision even as he tried to keep himself control under the vision of the caked hollowed eyed people, the desperation of the sick rhino woman; of his own detrimental exhaustion that came along with having such a consistent pattern of inhumanity in his day to day life. The regal beauty of the statues beside the walls were continuing to meet Bojack's blurred and panicked vision; even as he rushed his way past the several different content and richly laden people that were walking down the hallway, their voices talking in a low contentment as he erratically shoved his way past them with a pant and breathe, he could sense to some extent the reason as to why he had wanted to take you here to begin with. A part of him had sensed that artistry inside of him when he had felt your tenderness; a romanticism of what he wanted to share with you, somewhere, under the layered habit of chaos of which was all the motion that Bojack knew.

So many times had he lost himself and time to art-mostly in his own personal fashion of his shows, and yet he had never come close to realizing what he did now; there was nothing inside of anything that was perceived or made real unless there was the experience of some human connection that followed and filled it. He was a mixed piece of everyday interaction, art, person, and contact he had come to interact with, and he felt as if, even with all the richness of what those experiences had implied, he had landed flat on his face with a certain one dimensionality of a reflection of his own self. He had tried, for the sake of trying to appease the occasional sense of insanity and of the harrowing suffering, that he could have done anything to remember human connection in the empty mundanity of his life, but his eccentricity, narrative, and corner of his own world had been relevant only to himself and nothing else; without any stimulation of perception or of even anyone to share it with, he had found himself time and time again in the same void of corner with nothing but wall of pain on every end; such as he did so as he tried to make sense of the erratic thought and the fleeting black turn of his vision as he shoved his way through the scattered people of the hallway while they talked in low conversation from the open exhibit.

"Shut up. Shut up, shut up, sack of shit. You're fine." Another heavy breath, mixed in with another rub against his neck. "You've done this before, you fat cod. No reason to get all caught up in it now."

Talking to himself kept him grounded-it reminded him that he was more than the dissociated fog that polluted his mind now, a person outside of the crazed disassociated mesh of what the crack and terrible thought did to him. With the increasing sense of panic still haunting his burning lungs did he continue to jump his way through the blurry halls, shoving his way through several of the bodies that were barely predictable in their interaction against his frantic hand while he tired to find the same archway with the galactic light and balcony through his vision.

"Hey-" A lender lizard spoke, dress turned as she turned with her lips full and tongue forked out. Her eyes were narrow in a hard heat as she turned her head over her shoulder, red dress and straps slung against her as she offered him a flair of her anger.

"Hey-sorry," he managed, offering her a jaded and awkward grin that he was sure looked as unhinged as he felt as he continued to shove his way through the bodies. A breath, along with a sudden exhaustion that grazed his hitching dry throat, overcame him as he felt his body jam around the marble wall for a moment when he stumbled his way to the side of the marable wall, head turned downward as he continued to breath in his panicked labor. Part of him has flirted with the idea of making his way to the closest cigarette store-in the middle of his muddled sense of the world did he not remember just how far that was, much less as to what the long term result of that would be; he only knew he needed all of his usual bleak relief. He only knew that in the moment, the promised relief of the cigarette was familiar and mouth watering. What you gave you was something he couldn't quite wrap his head around; and though he had long since known in the back of his mind that made up a maddening intuition that he had long since gradually destroyed and chipped away at himself and his sanity over a period of time an cut himself off of possibility through the lurxixous house just small enough to cut out the endless and terrifying possibility of his humanity, he still found himself continuously chipping away at the sickly famailiry.

But his instincts, seeming now almost animalistic in nature, were turning him down a different oath entirely.

He took a shaky breath as he leaned out his hands and pressed it against the phone in his pocket, other palm resting beside the marble; a face of a woman with her blank eyes turned up to the ceiling in what seemed like a meditative appreciation. His hands shook around the phone as he stared at the empty screen with dulled and trembling eyes, caressing his hands against the red back of the phone to ground himself. He pressed one trembling thumb towards the menu of the phone as he saw your name lit up, somehow, through the blurry dysfunction of his eyes. He closed his eyes as he pressed his lips together and then took to tapping the phone number, desperately waiting for your answer on the other side of the phone as he pulled it to his ear.

"Where are you?" Your voice, to his own poisoned brain, sounded like a distant and foggy memory, and he found it was only serving to make him feel worse.

"Why are you talking like that?" Bojack's ears flew down, eyes winced frantically as he tried to calm his labored breath while he tentatively looked to the side, attempting at causality coming over into a stumbling nervousness that pierced right through its own self and saw the fogged wall of mockery the lie of functionality for the sake of his attempt at not seeing how terrible things were. "You don't have to talk like that. You don't have to talk like there's anything more going on other than the usual-dating bullshit, right? Is that what you middle class people call it?"

A hesitance came from the phone. And them-

"Are you ok?"

"I-" He paused, focusing on the ringing in his ear . His expression grimaced, eyes closing as his teeth smashed together while his hand came to grip his ear. "I'm here. That's the important part. And you need to know that."

"I'll come and get you." He briefly heard the sound of your body moving, hearing the distinct sounds of the sounds of your hands whispering off of the edge of the balcony"Where are you?"

He looked down at his trembling hands. His fingertips gently grazed against his palm, vaguely aware of the wrinkles under her eyes and that all too familiar bulging that he did whenever he felt he was at an odds of how to keep himself calm.

"No." Voice somber, oddly sacrificing, with a sense of blunt fight to it as he spoke; an emotionally intelligence that spoke that he had a maturity of knowing when something was bigger than himself. "Please. Don't."

"Bojack, you know it's fine."

"No, it's not fine. None of this is."

"I don't have anything else. If anything-""

"Don't…do that. I'll be fine. I'll get to you." He managed a broken, shaky chuckle. "I don't need to be led out of here. Especially by the woman this was supposed to be for-not the opposite. It's not that complicated."

A pause came from your end.

"You're right. It's not complicated. None of this is at all. As a matter of fact, I'm right where you left me."

A teasing was in your voice, though there was enough genuine suggestion of an edge of you wanting to come to him that it was rough to make the rounded curve of his cheeks burn. "Unlike you, I don't go rushing off without even the slightest bit of explanation."

"Sorry." Bojack spoke the word as if it were the embodiment of the way he felt his facial features cramp in tension at the embarrassment, and for a moment he felt the need to, at the very least, offer explantation; although he can already feel the unforgiving pounding on the front of his chest even at the thought of betraying his own personal ironic warmth of a hell, and he felt the confession of his painted melancholic narrative being jammed into his throat before he could start.

"I needed to see something tonight that felt as if it wasn't going to go anywhere."

"Yeah?" Your voice was trailing along with his panted breaths, words barely coherent through his words; were it not for the dignified way he had that natural sharp emotional intelligence, it wouldn't have been coherent at all; but anyway, there was something about the way you guided and spoke to join him within the softness of your own trail of grounded modesty that caused him to feel as if his wreck had physical company. "And where was that tonight?"

Bojack's mind scrambled for an answer. Not only was honesty something that felt as if it would destroy the both of you, but just as well was lying the one way he could give you the afternoon he wish he could-had he been the version of himself he wished existed.

"Bathroom. You'd be amazed at how intense that place can get these days."

He paused for a moment when there was nothing but silence from the other side of the phone. You knew he was lying, but the thing about the energy you had between one another was that you met it with a warm trial of a patience; enfolding, emotionally sound and mature rather than quick and impulsive, and he could feel the loneliness of that purity in a world where good people and qualities were pushed to the obscure corners of art of the world and the rest were loud and celebrate, rewarded, in their sin.

He allowed himself a heavy breath to reset as he looked forward in front of him towards the archway with the illuminated galactic blue flowing from it, feeling as if the only thing he wanted was to see you, but also knowing it was the last thing that he should have done. Despite the horror and the intensity of his shame of action only an hour or so before, the crack was making time more blurred than it had ever been even on his worst and most disoriented day; and he felt himself almost becoming more giddy in the way he wanted to find you despite his fear and shame and a lifetime of weight; soft trails of small sounds inside of himself of encouragement guiding him through the quiet.

"I wish there was a literal measurement to see if I was worth this or not. If there was a way to measure person's current worthiness based on action, instead of this grimy inner tormented unseen way that we have to interpet without understanding any of it." His hand began to release from the side of the sculpture, ears lowered in his timid uncertainty as his fingers came to rest beside his palm.

"I'm right here, Bojack. I've come a long way in life. I don't care about anything else. It's just a matter of you coming to where I'm already waiting."

"Can I meet you somewhere?" His voice was soft and trailed into a somber consideration as he began to follow the soft trail of wonder you were giving him, giving soft breaths of his rasps of acknowledgement as he began to shrug and ease his way through the people that were walking past him, his air more apologetic and quiet now, trialing towards the guidance of the soft wonder you were inspiring out of him in your flexibility. He was gone from any kind of sharpened tongue the way he had held earlier that day. His voice was soft now, completely and utterly defeated, and if it wasn't for his masculine voice, ti almost would have sounded like a lost child, impossibly gentle soul, and one of which was only just starting to wonder where home was.

"Auditory balcony. A few more inches down from where you left me."

"That is what I hoped you would say."

Bojack's air was holding of one of which had never been seen for what he actually was under the layer of his complication; someone who had that pure and genuine essence to him that could only come from a true and pure heart only after a detrimental amount of lifelong suffering that had been taken from every need, made worse from the cheapened world with no obligation to heal the wreck of what he had been born into; and the truth of life was in that hollowing suffering, as well as the opening of someone especially wide eyed and full of that depth that only came after someone had detrimentally and unceasingly suffered. There was a depth to your emotional intimacy that could only come from the suffering; and the richness between the both of you was far beyond casualty of those more comfortable to ease of stagnant blessing over ease of stagnant blessing with now nuance of human existence to ascribe the genuine layers between the rich experience.

Your voice was slightly different, as if you were a little bit more attached to the guide of talking between the both of you, rather than simply taking it for the cheap new trial of survival it had been before.

"Richness and kindness gives you richness and kindness in kind, Bojack, and cheapness will be cheap. You gave me something wonderful, and I've been feeling how rich of a reward it is on the other side of it because you've given me this space. You're not cheap in life because you're a cheap person, it's just the end result of what you've allowed the world to give you because of what you've given it."

"Very insightful. But I'm more of a technical and what is physically happening kind of guy, not so much someone who believes in this subconscious attempts at meaning. It's all fluff to make someone feel more comfortable or more rich about what is actually going on, but-it has no grounding in reality, or ever comes true outside of that subconscious. So what's the point."

"I guess I wouldn't know much about the point to anything other than surviving. You're right."

"That's not what I meant. I'm sorry."

He took another breath as he managed to make his way around the corner of the open archway, keeping his hands beside the marble beside the corner of the arch as his ears lowered while he turned his tender, exhausted eyes around the corner of the archway. Down the artificial balcony that was drenched in the illuminated blue light of the galactic tide easing in front of the rail did he catch your slender body standing beside it, dressed in that white dress and pulled down in its disquieted fabrication of tender lost resolve as it swayed around the movements of your body.

"Coming. Don't go anywhere."

"I'm not the one that's going anywhere. Even though I may more than likely be the one who would be able to know how to survive if I did run off into nowhere." There was a laugh to the last word of your response. Bojack even found himself giving the smallest reflection of a laugh as it intermelded into your own word, gentle and somber in its tentative agreement with the sound of your breath.

"I guess that is true. But-really. I'll find you and I'll sure this feels less like a mess, ok? Or-try to."

His teeth poked as he tried to ease himself down from the frantic panic that took his senses; but Bojack had been in plenty of places this unhealthy before in all fashions, and if there had ever been a preparation for whatever it was occurring between the both of you, it would have been to know how to leverage himself from the erratic sickness of his constant struggle.

"You don't need to do anything, Bojack. You've already done more than most will even consider in their lifetime, and they'll praise themselves for their life without ever having served or done anything at all. People are born and they either are isolated and fogged over with their own secret independent suffering that keeps them from thinking clearly, or they are apart of the problem of overlooking genuine suffering. You overcame all of that-and without even trying."

He readjusted the shrug part of his tuxedo as he pulled it over his shoulder, readjusting it onto his torso as his eyes flicked up to where you were standing. He took to patting down the tuxedo part of his shrug over his shirt, attempting to adjust the winkles in his shirt, then quickly began to wash his way down the hallway as he tried to swipe off, as much as he could in his disassociated and fogged state, any signs of the chaos of the swan woman and the interaction of the melding of her lipstick and the slight grumbled fumbling of the marks on Bojack's clothes.

"Right. Just hang on. That's all that I meant to say."

He rushed his way down the hallway, one of which was already fairly narrow in its artificial gray narrow street enough as it was, but luckily enough devoid of any people save for a few meandering couples that were taking to leaning beside one another. The galactic reflection eased against Bojack's profile as he began to rushed his way down the hallway, himself giving his timid breaths while his ears still kept tenderly lowered as he rushed his way through quiet illuminated galactic blue area. He grabbed both his hands around the cigarette that he successfully found this time as he patted his hands beside his pocket in the middle of his frantic panic and the attempt to finding anything to recenter. He didn't lit the stick, but he did keep the cheap paper delicately balanced in his fingers as he continued to give soft mumbles and an occasional somber grunt while his fast pace slowed to a gradual walk.

He gave another soft whimper of a sound as he began to slow his feet to a close, eyes wincing further as he looked over the way you were leaning over on the side of the balcony, exactly where you had promised. His fingertips scratched the side of his cheek as he looked you over while he felt a strange calm overcome him at the sight of you; from the slender and sickly unremarkable way you were eased beside the balcony to the flash of the blue pattern beside your body. He felt his own panic calm as he took in the detail of you that almost came him the same grounding calm of what he would have achieved when he was a child, before the world had corrupted him into constant overcomplication. He watched as he saw your fingers, slender and sickly but authentic in their air, turning beside the inside of your palm as your hands kept beside the balcony, turning into your hands, the veins popped and ruptured as they poked from your skin from their wear, and followed the movements of your hands.

Your eyes were distant as they looked over the the balcony in front of you, the compact of your emotion reflected and made richer from the expanse of the blue galaxy beside your eyes, adding onto the death of what drew Bojack in, and yet still an extension of exhaustion of human tragedy of things about your own existence and Bojack's in kind that would never be solved or given a silver lining, as with most realistic life.

As he took in your beauty, he felt the hollowing memory of driving down the whipping street of Ohio again. You reminded him of that same bittersweet, releasing eternal center of what was the indescribable edge to profound suffering and the verge of death such as he had been on when on on his bender-that sense of some release that was terrifying or unknown the majority of the time, even as it was the answer through every crack of life, and so profound that when it was felt for the brief moment it was, it was so compelling towards everything satagant activity behind it that it gave even the blackest suffering of life a deep meaning, hardly ever seen, and always pursued.

That familiar images of the cold wind and rushing snow through the open window rushed back to him memories of Sarah Lynn pressing her body against his shoulder as the phone full of her nude photos was gripped her hand while she spoke to him in those erratic and high pitched comments that drained and in worst moments destroyed him-and even that, too, had been familiar and something he had gone to and kept with time and time again just for even that slightest brief warmth of home. While he had been in the blur of the midst of his heroin laced weed infused and vodka induced muggy thread of uncaring, he had felt the same hollowing ancient extent he felt looking at you now; full of an odd eternal grief of something timeless before his time, and yet as present as much as everything happening around him as he unseen sensation continued to spark through him.

He had remembered seeing various different melancholic images as they flashed in front of his eyes, tormented and as hollowed as his eyes were as they were puffy and dilated in stimulants and pani as he tried his best to simply keep his slipped hand on the wheel while driving through the timeless snow meeting empty eyes.

Sarah Lynn's voice had been easing out in high pitched fever as much as she ever did, unseing towards his emotion and mood or anything going on within him as much as anyone had ever been-but he long since gotten used to the boring disconnect that came from the lack of connection of being truly seen of what was going on inside even by those he would have considered close.

She had spent the entire foggy afternoon lifting her pale legs up, covered up in tattoos and various different cuts and bruises of blood of shots from needles as she had thrown her body backwards against the chair with her voice calling out into a high-pitched nature of someone who truly was no longer bound by the sense of caring about whatever was to occur at any moment. Even back then, Boajck had had a frusstaring amount of an odd care to himself that he loathed; a boring and unsdeseved feeling that he wanted to keep himself tethered onto eartha nd life, even then-the same way he ahd always felt despsite evry which way he didn't. Sarah Lynn had been as carefree as ever in her suicidal ideology, carrying it from the slender delicate nature of her body to the energy of how she had casted her sickly uncare around with her actions and casual nature of her words; it was from more than just being influenced by privileged. People like her had had the gift of genuinely long since leaving the world, and Bojack had felt himself relentlessly jealous.

He had carried a heavy and disappointing loathing to himself to have that grounded and quite literall stout feeling of wanting to care of himself, not just from a more grounded air but alos down to the stout and plump nature of his body and howinflexable it was; in a sense, Bojack felt as if both his kind and body had been waiting for you, to fill the emptiness where previously there had been nothing but a void of a man with all the comfortablity of someone who had settled down, but had never had the actual human bond to justified what was his otherwise pathetic complacency.

At fist it had only ever frustrated him that he felt and carried himself that way, and so consistently depsite his every attempt to be as carefree and as untethered to the world as much as Sarah Lynn. His every action had stemmed from wanting to get rid of the heaviness that came along with worrying abouts staying on the wretched earth and as a functional person within it, his physical body and the plush nature of it being not just the only thing that was frustrated with in terms of his energy.

The illusions that had dressed his eyes back then had been nothing but part of his constant and disquintied energy of a rich imagiantion that not only was unseen by the majority, but haunted him more than helped. As he had driven his partly empty and partly rich endeavored mind down the quick snowy streets, he had found more comfort in the bitter rather than avoidance. There had been several woman and men in suits that had begun strutting their way across the foggy and detached gray streets; they had had crowns of what seemed like a galactic and shining blue light that adorned their headspaces as they had walked their way across, and yet it had been far from beautiful and comforting; indifferent, at best, and a sense of that edge of horrifying Bojakc got more often than not when it came to anything within him.

Their heads had hit together, and their faces seemed inhumanely frozen into a twist of surprise as they had walked their way across the street. The sides of their head had adorned beside one another as the stars that surrounded their heads, which was an extension of blue illuminated light as they tapped their heads beside one another, the only sign of emotion through their frozen faces of what seemed like a wonder that was of an awe more than they knew what to do with, tapped beside themseleves as the galatic light spewed beside them into a quick ball of response besdie them. There had been an individuality that had overtaken Bojack at seeing them; something that took him into an extension and promise of being known as who he was from their chillingly empty eyes; the woman had turned her eyes to Bojack, her eyes bulged and hollowing as the plastic look in her eyes rolled down beside her sockets-and Bojack's expression had only frozen into a brief tremor of his own barely visible reaction. Even under all the stimulants Bojack was under, he knew it couldn't have been real, and Bojack had long since become familiar with the countless ways of which his mind destroyed and haunted him-especially on the verge of stimulants.

His had turned his small pupils and tormented eyes towards Sarah Lynn every now as he tried to pick up her erratic energy in the casual twist of her body that spoke every which way someone had given up and detached themselves from anything around them. He had turned to her for the sake of trying to regorund himself from when he felt surreal and detached from everything entirely, and if nothing else, the focus of her trauma kept his tormented and heavy mind plenty occupied. He had offered her his occasional word and conversation, voice somber as he spoke to her while he tried to keep himself as invested in the reality around him, though it was only for the balance of pained madness he knew was on the other side if he didn't. It wasn't until he briefly saw the way that there was several different ghastly gray silhouettes of women that were standing across the street that caused Bojack to break the spell of his own complacent with his surreality of his imagination, twisted and barely seen in front of him, and an extent of that caused him the same disorders of his muggled understanding of life around him, and a few more decisions and death could have come; and yet even then, he had wanted to stay grounded in reality for a purpose he had always felt he needed to stay attached to, even as he had never had any technical reason for feeling that way; the most maddening thing about the emotion of all.

He had given a dry sigh as his pupils were dilated into a small maddened focus while he had driven down the street, grounding himself into impossible focus in any way he could even as he had seen the continuous way that the fog had laced in front of his eyes that had made up the vision that partially demanded his attention.

He had spoken his occasional comment to Sarah Lynn, hardly aware less than half of the time about what he was saying or how he was saying it-and when he was, the most blunt and soulless statement. The snow had passed, the thrill of her comments and voice had carried the majority of the conversation, her pale legs swung and intertwined onto the top of the car rest while she had tapped into every distraction on her phone. Miserable, disconnected and as empty as Bojack had always been, there was an annoyance in him when it came to the things people entertained themselves with, and Bojack found there was a faith inside of him far more satisfying, even as it isolated and detached him from the world that he felt reassured from. He had allowed Sarah Lynn to carry the majority of the conversation, her voice as content and full as one was within the world as much as they ever could be.

When he had thought he had manipulated the sickness of his stimulated mind to become robotic and to be wired to not necessarily be concerned about what he perceived, took in or imagined, or what happened to him while he stayed in the mechanical mode of driving down the road, the blurry disassociation to force his already squinted and dark eyes up to the sky in front of him while he felt the passing of the clouds beside his eyes as he turned up to the space of the sky that flew beside the road.

Though he had tried to dart his eyes down and keep the pain of his erratic disassociation to himself and the scattering of images in his mind, he had kept turning his eyes up to the scattered clouds in front of his vision; the tormented images his imagination came up with were just as tormented and delicate in their detail as much as he would have imagined, spooning bodies that have ends of tormented human suffering that came in various different barely understood forms, spinning through the trails of the clouds in front of his tormented eyes as he saw the whisps of them trailing through the gray fogged sky, muddled and misted. Some of them had seemed to have a physical movement that Bojack recognized whether he wanted to or not; the turn of a head, and the eyes seeming wide and harrowing in their wide expanse of their vision that seemed as if they were taking in the world for the first time, and yet the emotion in them had been so harrowing with some indescribable black emotion that it had caused Bojack to physically turn down into his chair again with a pained tremor, ears flying back, eyes tormented, and mind trying to erase that of which had been taken in.

At one point, Bojack had taken it upon himself to glance into the rear view mirror, pressing a hand roughly onto the wheel and had given a slight abrupt sound of surprise as he had slammed his foot against the pedal. Sarah Lynn's body had slammed forward, and she had barely managed to catch herself onto the front of the car as the weight of it was slammed forward. Bojack's eyes had been fearful and hollowed as he had turned his head over his shoulder while breathing in rasped frantic heaviness. He had given a clumsy, fearful whine as he had turned his head and bugging hollowing eyes over his shoulder; what had caught his eyes had been an intertwined couple that had been pressed against each other, and worse than the way that the boundaries seemed to be etched into one another were their eyes black. His eyes had bugged and dilated further into fear as he had breathed heavily while sinking into his chair in dread, expression hallowed and tense and drenched with that rich fear in his eyes. They were man and woman, and one the side of the chair was meeting the both of their already stitched together bodies that seemed intermeleded at the seams, arms pulled around one another and eyes hollywood and black wile curves of faces met against one another in a sickly meld of intervention. He had stared for a long moment as the frantic and heavy rasps of his conflicted breath had left his lips and eyes were hollowed and wide with fear while Sarah Lynn settled into swear asking what was wrong with him through the ringing in his ears, and although it has been a horrifying sensation, it felt as if he had been revealed to something fresh as their intermelded skin and eventual hallowed black eyes had turned to Bojack, as much as the intermelding of bodies had allowed, drenched in bonding but something about their rhythm seeming as if they were exchanging from the inside out with an odd despair, and as hollowed had turned to Bojack once their intimacy ceased, it seemed as if for a moment Bojack had been revealed to a deep truth about existence, both with dispiar and celebration, as their heads had quirked and turned to him with their black and hollowed face and blurred seams of their faces.

"Christ." Sarah Lynn had barely managed to collect herself from where her body was thrown on the air pouch beside her, sickly and drenched eyes against a pale face flashing in annoyance as she looked over at Bojack with a raised brow in her empty pathetic eyes. Beyond, on the snowy isolated valley of Ohio back then, had he briefly seen the extension of what seemed her own forn, as nothing but fog and a silhouette that was barely seen through the valley. Bojack's breath had come out in that frantic and clumsy detachment, eyes hollowed, pupils dilated as he had tried to calm the bottle of insanity and horror in him while he had forced himself on lean back on the chair. "Can you at least make sure to warn me before you have a stroke on the gas pedal?"

Seeing you now, with Bojack's eyes drenched in wet melancholy as his ears lowered while he abruptly paused and gave a tender breath as ears lowered back, stopping himself in the middle of wanting to rush to you, did he find himself feel the same sensation of a surreal demand of something far wiser and more grounded than him, and yet he knew of very little of any way it could have successfully spoken to him. He did know that for the time being, he could focus on the simple wisdom of trying to focus on the person in front of him. He was only halfway done with breaking himself down with his sanity in his own personal torment that had never had anyone especially encouraging or connected to him to tell him anything reassuring-even less anything that inspired love out of him.

"Excuse me." Bojack gave a soft rasp of his words as he began to shoulder his way through the last of the few people that were standing towards the edge of the exhibit. His emotions, rich with wet insecurity began to take to walking towards yourself and the details of your inner life and physical emotion in all of its core of unseen detail and the want of someone's focus to connect with it-and he felt he was one of the few lucky to feel inspired that he could be one of the few ones to feel as if there were reward for giving attention to it.

Despite the alert observation of your eyes, there was something in the way you stood that spoke that you didn't quite know that he was directly behind you yet. He felt his teeth poke as his puffed under eyelids eased up. He didn't know what to say or how to say it, but as he walked his stoic and oddly graceful form, if only for his focused air, over to you, some breaths and insulated whispers came out of his mouth as he tried to find a start to it. Clumsy mumbles came were speaking from numb lips from the corner of his mind that wanted to speak passages of words that would open up the emotional doors he knew had an extension of possibility. He didn't know what was beyond them or possible, but like anything that was truly human or mattered, and whether it felt good or not, he felt as if he would follow it and speak it regardless, and would be forced to turn to you and to open and discover what it was, as anyone did to try and find their meaning, and would happen regardless of whether he felt he could handle it or not. No matter what the road looked like or how hard it was, something inside of hi beyond what he could understand knew he wanted what you had to give; that he would do anything for it, in whatever way it came to him or challenged him.

The monotoned narrative was silent for the time being, and for now there was only the meditative galactic light that was surrounded over the expanse of the balcony, the stars and reflection of the perspective easing across the stage. He felt a small and tentative smile curve on his lip as he walked his way to you; weary as he could be with life regardless of in times he had had his social needs fulfilled and when he hadn't, there had always been a constant emptiness with life;it was just that there were more distracted islands to mold around it when things were going well. For now, if he fought through his natural existing sickness, he felt as if there was something especially enduring with you-harrowing and wrecked by life, but something especially rich in its confidence despite the world; not unlike youth, and something that Bojack had been ripped from too early.

"You know, it's kind of ridiculous. How differently it all changes so fast. I feel like I never can really understand or accept the way that I feel at any given moment because I know I'll feel different a couple of seconds later. And the worst part about countless emotions like that is that I don't know for sure if anybody else feels that way, or if I'm the only one that does, which digs it further into that feeling. Not that those feelings of regret ever leave you alone, anyway, even if you share them." His elbows came to rest beside the balcony, currently drenched in the white spotted light and the reflection of the blue that surrounded and passed over the both of you. Your elbows were leaned beside the baloney, head turned forward in quiet thought; and then turned as you watched the tentative concern in Bojack's eyes as he watched your expression turn ot meet his and his hallowed but richness and well meaning ones. "But I wasn't expecting it all to feel as-grounded, in a sense, as I feel with you against me when we're in bed at night. No matter what happens after this, thank you for that"

Your body shouldered in interested at his words, and slowly did you turn to his eyes as you looked over at him. Your face was graced by the galaxy of the lights as they traced your features, and for a moment did it seem as if you were too lost in thought to respond, and despite that natural unspoken confidence between the both of you, he felt a sudden frantic doubt inside of him while you turned to his eyes while his under chaos was unspoken through the untouched nature of his disposition. But you came back to the present, a warmth grazing your lip in a smile as the heat of your soft eyes looked him over.

"Time just-passes." He gave a small shrug as he turned his heavy eyelids over to the front of the balcony, easing his elbows beside it as he looked with a complacent dead eyesight over to the sky. His pupils dilated in thought as he turned to the side. "I mean-I know it will pass anything regardless of how I decide I feel about it, and that's one of the few good things about it, but it always felt like this tormented waiting obligation."

"For what?" Your elbow leaned beside the rail, and his dim and heavy eyes turned to you, though not entirely meeting yours in his emotional erratic thought and vulnerability.

"Anything. For it to get better, easier, or even just for time to pass, in general, for the inevitable change that would bring. And it always felt like such a constant fight, even though I would have done anything for it to not; but that was the only way that time passed." He paused for a moment as the aimless emptiness of his eyes stayed focused towards the blue light and the galactic nature that reflected beside his face. "It dosen't feel that way with you. Time dosen't feel like a fight I don't have a choice but to have. It feels-" He winced as he paused and took a slight hitch of a breath in consideration. "-Normal. Natural. Present. It's-" He paused as his eyes turned down in consideration for a moment, expression pouted in confliction. "It feels strange, is all. I don't know if it should be trusted or listened to, but-I do feel it. And I'm not denying it."

He kept his dry and stoic eyes to the galactic space in front of him, eyes detached in a distant resolve while he watched the turning of the stars pass in front of his distant eyes.

"You're on stimulants." The words were spoken more of a soft observation; gentle, taking it for what it was; no judgment or a need to hide from the observation; a simple statement for what and as it was.

"Huh?" His ears flew up, eyes wide in question; and then lowered as he saw the soft insight of your eyes, in all of their bittersweet observation. "Oh. I mean-yes." His eyes darted over you in question, soft wonder in his eyes. "But that's not a problem or surprise, is it?"

Your eyes fluttered down as you stepped your way closer to Bojack, and your hand came out and eased beside his arm; slender fingertips hesitated beside his shoulder, and although Bojack seemed tense at first, he allowed himself to sink beside you touch, taking the wordless silence for what it was meant to be as he turned the empty of his wandering eyes back to the endless space beside him.

"What a cliche that is, anyway. You're too good to be thrown off by things like this. And I'm-" He paused as he tried to talk through the shame built up in his throat. "I am sorry that I'm putting you through it. It is selfish."

He began to press his fingers over on the side of his pocket, feeling for the cigarette that he knew fell out of the spaces of his fingertips while he had rushed his way through the hallway to find you. "You know, considering how much I paid to be at this dump, I think it's fair to say that we can both do whatever we want. In whatever way that feels like for you, especially-obviously."

There was silence from your end; sickly in its own right that came along with a hard life, but he felt his eyes turning to you in a soft guide of question, and it didn't feel edged or forced or with anything other than the natural and undeniable sense of simple want.

"Man's desperation for meaning leads to contempt when others don't seek for it. I learned that the hard way, as someone who was told I was worth of contempt for not. Not that I ever could have changed it."

"Don't worry about any of that." He gazed at you, expression dim in his own tentative consideration while he observed the depth of your troubeled eyes. "I've done it and been around people who do it my entire life-and believe me, that's not the answer. Maybe nothing is. Mabe people can't stand that, so they make up something that is to feel superior for their own sanity."

Your head titled down, and Bojack could tell that even just from speaking the words he had, that he would never be able to obtain the life experience you had had in order to even come close to speaking the proper words. He closed his eyes as he tried to let his loathing flow through him, though it wasn't as abrasive or black as much as he would have expected. There was a smoothness within your energy; a gentle ease, despite whatever occurrence or problem would have come up where otherwise under a more common and less forgiving air there would have only been a sharp edge of suffocation of performance.

"How do you feel about a moment of..catching up, in a sense?" His eyes turned to you, tentative and hesitant, and your head slowly turned to his own as he gazed at you with an almost shy considerable emotion. Another small shrug. "I think I owe it to you, after everything that I've been doing, and the way that I've been talking to you today."

You gave him a smile; tired, forgiving, and with that odd naturing extent to it that made him feel drawn in in ways he couldn't fathom, much less fight. " If you think that would help."

His eyes didn't bother lacing over in concern as he tried to read the pale softness of your face. "Would it help you?"

Your eyes turned over the lights in thought. He felt the want to caress the side of your face, but his fingertips came to ease beside his palm almost as quickly as they made the movement to reach out.

"I don't know."

He laughed, quietly, in a bitter and ironic fashion.

"I know what you mean." His eyes eased up to the lights beside him; the galaxy was turning into a more red hue now, hallowing and passing over the empty space that was currently surrounding the two of you that would have made up the preface before anything significant happened.; the empty guide and space of the before.

"Really, if there's anything that I can do to make this better. I know that I haven't been acting…the way that any kind of partner or anybody should."

He didn't mean for the word partner to slip out, but it almost felt more unnatural to not say it that it would to try and find another word for the undeniable amount of emotion surrounding the both of you and the gradual quiet build up known as the profound chemistry and meaning between you both and the build up of it.

"Bojack, It's okay."

His eyes darted in conflict as he looked you over.

"What is?"

"I knew that I wasn't signing up for a conventional ride when I decided to get in here. Or to go to your house."

"No, that's not-"

"And honestly, my life has been far from the typical regardless. I have no expectations, there's nothing to perform for. I'm just here, and you gave me the honor of being here for a little while with you, and I can't thank you enough for that alone."

Bojack managed a small curve of a smile, although he couldn't help but feel a certain kind of suggestion of a defeat inside your voice now even as you spoke in reassurance. Slowly did he look down in front of him as he gently danced fingertips over the fabric of his pocket.

"I get it." His eyes turned up as he gazed up the swirling of the lights that were now moving in a three hundred and sixty degree angle in front of him, his expression eased up into a wonder as he felt it reflect beside his eyes; the sensation of the crack he had taken was making it all feel even more surreal than it had ever been, an physical height of conflict and surreality that would have been overwhelming had it not been for the fact that there was some part of hi much more focused and grounded on you. His eyes lowered as he eased his tormented thought in guidance of consideration. "I imagine that it would be nice, though, to have one place where that wasn't expected. Or where you could at least get a break from it." He turned his eyes back to you in soft thought. "Is that right?"

"It sounds like a great idea." There was a small smile to your voice; genuine good, and peaceful, and he felt a soft laugh leave him again in an agreement, or at least the peace of the want of it. Your head titled to the side as your hands kept by the balcony. "What I've come to learn is that true strength of character comes from people who are willing and able to dig and find joy and good and be good when there is none-and almost every person on this earth, whether rewarded or punished for it, fails the test. The rarest thing is to find someone who does, beyond doubt, and sees the good and the right through and through beside being told countless times to have every reason to not."

"Yeah?"

"It feels much easier, more natural here, than anywhere I've ever been."

"The stars or..me?"

His voice was soft spoken in a clumsy and delicate uncertainty. When there was no response immediately, he took to turning his eyes to you as he looked you over in question, eyes gently dancing back and forth between the edge of your profile. You still had that indescribable sense of love in your eyes, nor the disbelief that something existed or ever happened beyond the technical like Bojack did- or the large parts of himself that had caused himself the conviction that he never felt he deserved such a belief.

"All of it. In general. None of this would have happened, I wouldn't be here, if it weren't for you taking me in."

His eyes were dim in a somber light as he spoke;

"And is that a good thing?"

"I feel nothing but better for it. I feel it."

"You think so?"

"Everything about you I've known since the second I was able to recognize you physically. It wasn't necessarily that I was expecting you, and when I came to know you it felt as if you were introducing yourself to me in this fresh way; and yet I had never felt so understood, or more elated or drawn into know someone and to feel so endeared by it; like the perfect combination of emotion that would lead to that rare thing known as emotional connection."

Though he could feel something indescribable at your words; a fresh insight, odd relief, and something too intense more than he could find the energy to face, he felt himself ease into a somber acceptance. Rather than the intensity of your words, and even more surprisingly, his belief in them, it felt like a quiet and somber completion, an endearing home, rather than something overwhelming. His fingertips found their way beside the balcony, his expression tense in timid consideration as he gripped the side of it.

"Yeah, well, in order to meet you with that, I can certainly tell you It wasn't the first time I felt as if the roads were asking me to stop by. Believe me, normally the last thing I would have done."

He gave a quiet breath as he patted his fingers on the pocket beside his hips that he knew held the keys, threading his palms into the pocket until he felt the metal clang against his fingertips. The intimacy of your hand beside his arm began to detach as Bojack began to stumble in his sudden onslaught of determination of intention as he grumbled and stumbled fro the rail.

"So what happens now? Do you want to try and make this whole crack infused mess worth it-" He indicated to his body, and even in his detached blurriness he knew it was tattered in holes and ripes from earlier when the swan hand pressed her determined flirtation over him. "-Or do you want to just pretend like you have anything better to do?" He dangled the metal in front of him as he swayed it in front of his presentation, swinging the metal in his hands, and coming into the much more comfortable teasing extent of his form of communcation. "Remember that I have the keys."

"Anything sounds incredible." Your hands began to detach from the balcony, warm eyes turning to his, uncertain and still full of more unreadable trails that led back to himself more than he was comfortable with; but your words were straight forward and clean.

"Really?" His eyes eased down into a humble vulnerability; but his smile raised up in a small fashion as he turned his eyes to yours while you eased yourself off of the edge. He gave you a small nod as he saw you walk to him, your disposition quiet and fragile, pale hands threading beside your palms as you began to walk to him. Even weeks later, you still had that scent of what seemed like a sense of something that came only from living outside and of being on the verge of life without reassurance towards what would come next; a certain molding of character and wisdom that only came from someone who lived life in the opposite of complacency and comfortability had had lived in the constant impulsivity of life, on the verge of the natural way of nature, something carefree and wise about your disposition that to Bojack seemed like it was with most things that went against the natural mainstream of the majority; naturally better off at at the core of what was the answer to the stupid and detrimental things people tried to make up as the answer even as they betrayed their own humanity. It was something he found himself naturally memorizing, whether he meant to or not.

"Wherever it is you think would be best. I have no preference."

"Great. Of course." His fingertips played beside his wrists as he stepped his way back, dangling the metal between the spaces of his fingertips while he gave you a small smile."As long as you're comfortable.."

His mind began to think erratically about where to take you. He stepped back as he watched you walk beside him, your steps delicate and tentative while your hands gripped beside the tattered nature of the fabric of your dress. His expression furrowed as he began to follow you down the hallway, his mind going over the possibility of what to do with you that would make the guilt of his destruction seem as if it was less of a definitive nature of the night and more of a side step of something that had occurred but didn't need to lead to a conclusion of the night or its meaning.

It would take about a half hour in his disoriented condition to get the blanket out of the car, partially because if the swan took to seeing him while he helped you leave the museum, he knew there would more than likely be a sense of a wall of guilt from his end that would make it difficult to surpass when he walked by her; his hope would be that she would leave well enough alone, but there was a fear he had associated with her, whether he liked to admit it or not. The remembrance of the way she had looked at him with that desperation beyond what he could find peace with when she had begged him for any chance of having that trail of humanity she thought he had, the way she had frozen in terror when he had asked her why she didn't claim the very thing she had said she thought she would had she gotten the chance; and the distinct thread of the hallucination of the curved people who had walked with their haunted gaunt beside the wall. He felt a fear more than this erratic heart could stand, and as he followed you a few paces behind for the both of you to make your way out of the door, he tried to recollect himself into a grounding of reassurance that it would just be hallway, and she had long since made it clear that her interest dispirited.

"Back to the car, or to a part of the museum again?" You paused as you stepped in the archway, and Bojack gave a slight jolt as you turned where the exhibit ended.

"Oh. Well-" He took to scratching the side of his cheek frantically. His mane was already in a state of disarray, and had it not been for the extensive detachment in his air, he knew he would have had much more sense of shame by now, more than he would have known ho to handle. He shook his head lightly as he reached out a hand and eased it beside the middle part of your back, guiding you outward while his arm guided you to the hallway. "Let's just try and make our way out here, see what feels good." He felt a slight strain in his tone as a pressure of sickness came over him from the crack, and a bloated sound escaped from his lip as he lost sense of control while he gave an abruptly sickly grunt. But he swallowed his words right along with it as he spoke; "The important thing is that you feel like you had a decent night out with a crackhead drunk." His eyes were hooded into his lowered and dry exasperation in his settlement of his unglamorous self-loathing as he spoke in a lower tone; "I'm sure that's an astoundly better standard than the men in your past."

Your smile raised up, as exhausted by the detriment of the storyline of your constant exhausted life as much as it had left the wreckage on your mind, air and vody that had led you to something that was full of an exhaustive hope that was drenched in the kind of despair that left detrimental marks and crippling humanity; but you had, bottom line, managed it.

"After a certain point in your life of seeing and meeting certain people and men, and seeing inside of yourself of your raw humanity when all else is fallen away, you realize there isn't anything inside of you that is above much of anyone. Just detached, different, lonely, frustrated."

"Oh. Yeah." He rubbed the side of his arm, gazing at you tentatively. He felt in over his head; but more than anything else did he just not want to talk over you. He gave a small shrug. "Makes sense."

"So there's no such thing for me as being too good for anyone. I'll take things as they are, in whatever way they come to me; I am modest and accepting of it above all. I'm just trying to survive and feel relief when I can; that's all anyone is. And I'm not in a place in my life where I could ever find myself too proud to ever deny that again."

"But don't you think there could be-more?" He gave a slight hitch of his breath while he winced as he began to follow you through the archway, his eyelids lowered and his expression looking you over in a dry extent of his concern for you. "Does it have to be so minimal?"

"I don't see anything else that makes sense. That's certainly the way it's been for me; and I've suffered through too much to deny the fact now. I've molded myself to it." Your head titled to the side of your shoulder, eyes detached and distant while your cheek rested beside your shoulder, and then you muttered a small; "I'll do anything you'd like. I'll take all of this for what it is."

Bojack took a breath, restarting, or at least attempting to dispiate the tension inside of the entanglement of his inside intense detriment. He gave a small curt nod as he gazed at you, eyelids heavied and lowered, but accepting.

"Ok." He paused as his worried, tender eyes lowered while he played with the keys between his fingertips, ears lowered while he grasped the metal into his hands and tried to find a balance within his palm. He stumbled a few times, but only from the trembling of his nerves. 'I'll, uh-take you outside, then. To the car. We'll try to go from there."

"I spent so much time in chaos. Every moment, every day a new exhausting way of just attempting to find peace in any way that I could. Peace comes from stagance, becuase life is slow stagance, and being in rhythm with it is the only thing that makes sense. Everything else a sin."

"Well, I wouldn't say-"

"I've been in a state of constant sin for a long time, and its wrecked me more than I know what to do with."

Bojack's eyes, as empty as always, turned as he looked you over. Your profile was traced by the blue of the illuminated light surrounding your body, your eyes eased into a softened consideration; detrimentally beautiful even in your wretched and conflicted sickness, and causing Bojack's ears to lower in an off sense of shame.

"The only thing that matters in life is simplicty and good-to stay true to what your isndie is telling you. That's all. We have all the wisedom inside of us, but we have to be willing to follow and be creative enough to experiment with it. That's how I survive for the amount of time I did. That was the only reason why I survived for the amount of time I did."

"Yeah, well-better than me."

"But that intense despair and emotional pain-there was nothing I ever could have done about that. It was always like nothing else-the pain, when I saw or felt something beautiful from someone who did have love in their life, that grounding sense of identity and good-" Your words stopped for a moment as your breath hitched, right along with the meditation of the pain of your reflection. "It was the one thing I didn't feel like I could overcome, that I felt would kill me. I don't feel it right now."

His eyes turned up, yet and in question, as he looked you over with compact emotional eyes. "No?"

"Thank you just for that. That's more I ever would have been lucky enough to experience. When you're in a hole for as long as I am, you begin to realize that anything good wouldn't be promised-and now that I have even the slightest peek through of it, I feel relieved."

Bojack took a small breath as he rolled his shoulders, eyes darting in thought as he gazed in front of him. He cleared his throat as he tried to clear his mind from the entanglement of his narratives, turning his eyes up to you as he gave you a curve of his somber smile.

"I'm glad. And I mean that."

His hand stayed beside the few spaces behind your back, though he didn't dare take it entirely to the space behind your back; he only did it in a strange uncertainty that he needed to take care of you and follow you. He had a detrimental amount of toxic narratives and attachments that he knew he as far too intertwined with to even come close with letting go, much less understanding them; he only knew that he could feel the black mud of the trails of his disruption following him and retching him down, just as you described, and he was far too gone to know how to end it other than endurance.

He gave his soft breaths of his attempts at statements to calm himself while he followed you through the galaxy ridden hallway, the blue lights that were still being projected from the galaxy and the space of the atmosphere that you had left still leaving in its residue as he continued to follow you down the hallway, currently dim as it began to collect itself from its aftershow. You seemed calmer, more in tune and content, for lack of a better word, than you had been since Bojack had taken you in. You were smooth and accepting, focused as you walked your way down the hallway-your hair, stranged from the past couple of days as it always was, and Bojack too inside of his detrimental insecuity to even consider helping to untanglle the knots in your hair despite his every want, seemed smoother in the way it trailed down your shoulders, and the disarray of it less notable than usual.

You calmed something inside of him that was irreplacable, more than anything else, and Bojack couldn't ignore his deep desire to find that quality of character calm that seemed to be the most rare thing alive. He still couldn't get rid of that amount of his constant guilt or the anixious need to do something terrible to give himself, at the very least, a sense of control over what could happen before something else did. As much as even Bojack had that wisedom in the back of his mind that simplicty and peace, even in its occassional challeneges or flaws, was all that there was, he still felt that detrimental lack of beleif that he could ever have that. In regards to anixety, he felt as there was a force being physically turned inside of his chest, and it promised to not lessen in its intenisty anytime soon; Bojack cerintelty knew that well enough, and he almost found comfort in the punishment and the bad; where there was nothing but bad, not ever had to be lost.

Even as his hands gripped tentievaley beside his chest as he followed you down the large galaxy ridden walls, opened up his mouth now and then as he turned shyly to you, then taking to stopping his words just as quickly as he felt the cut off of his rasped detirment, he found that there was more insecurity inside of him that previously hadn't been as forced as much as it was in his throat now. The crack and the side effects of the woman he had hooked up with were following him like black threads of black of guilt, and he was in the middle of being cradeled within it as to how he would allow himself to feel about the balance between the abrupt and exhusted punishment that he found his personal tormented comfort in, and the sense of home he couldn't deny you inspired.

He only managed to walk beside you in between the pause of his words, palms gripped bside his palms as he began to follow you down the hallway, worried eyes and inward preception of his torment only surrounding him through every highly dressed person with their hands trailed beside their glass as they walked their way past the both of you. Bojack winced as he pressed the back of his neck, fingertips pattering beside his neck as he contuined to follow you down the hallway. He was allowing the scent of you of that odd outdoor purity that you held and a sense of life expereince that had come from only being able to rely on yourself following his own much weaker and more cowardly way, and somehow that smoothed his cowardly, weak, overcomsumptive and sheltered personality that he could sense how much sicker and weaker it was in contrast to someone that had lived in raw nature and life for as long as you had.

The version of himself, an open introduction to something that was soft and trailed into a extensive promise of something rich and layered and beyond comprehsnion on an emotional level, and one he knew only existed in the dart of his eyes and the tenderness of his question while he snapped his attentenion to your profile now and then while you both walked your way down the hall, had to be one of the only guides of light that made him feel as if he deserved to be able to follow you in where you were depsite his high and how it was obvious you could sense and reconginze the marks of the swan and how she had encurled herslef beside his sickly and detached disassociaotion of exhustion.

Your hands curled beside Bojack's while he finsihed walking down the hall; Bojack felt himself tense in a black shock that as relentlesly guilt ridden at first; and then gradually begtan to ease into a small and slow acceptance as he allowed his palm to rest beside yours; that sickly trail that could be so easily triggered again settled into another reminder of an almost instant redeemability that came along with your connection that he still couldn't accept was as easy as it was. You didn't turn to look at him, but your fingertips as they trialed beside his palm spoke aall they needed; hands gliding across his palm while fingertips trailed beside his skin and caressed his hand. Your fingertips danced beside his palm until they came to guide beside his thigh, and he could feel the way that he was being brought closer to the extent of yourself and of what had made up a lifetime of challenege to get where you were and the personhood you held that attracted Bojack to your rariety of humanity; and for once, was he fully in the moment, and it was a soothing and reassuring detrimental feeling he never known he could have achieved to any degree after the amount of age he had had carrying nothing but that detriment.

Your fingertips were easing beside his the middle part of his palm as your hands squeezed beside his, hands communcating running up against him in a way that seemed to be suggesting that you were both with him even in his muddled bewilderment, but at the same time only starting all at once as to what lessens needed to be learned from it and where good was, if any. Not from lack of love; the both of you seemed to have an underhand agreement towards your consistnet nterest of one another. Yet, even with your fingertips playing beside the chubbiness of his palms and the soft permission of your fingertips that you wanted his intimacy and feltit vauable, he felt as if he was the only person that could reconginze what was going on. His exietence, like most, had been a constant thread of reajusting of new objects, people and experiences, and even pain, becuase even pain as better than the stagance of life everyone was trying to avoid thinking of too deeply-some more leevred and successgul with the distractions more than others, but all in the same hole and trying to turn away from the turth at the end of it.

For once, this distraction felt as if it were in rytham with the stagance, rather than figthing it, and he would certainty play the game if you wanted; though he felt too sick and tired in the ways that counted to truly be in celebration of anything other than resurrance, and he could recoginze in the sickness of your conflcited eeys you felt the same.

You stopped, just as you were aboutt o walk around the corner to the hallway, still not turning directly to Bojack, your steps pausing while you froze beside the archway.

"Are you ok?" Bojack winced as his voice was tenative, his skin still feeling bustled and prinkled from his nervounsess, and his hands coming to rub beside his neck while he scratched the side of his cheek; the nervous energy flittering in his dispotion was more than what he knew how to carry.

"I knew something was wrong with you from the second you woke up this morning to help me smoke. When you gave me one of your cigerrtees and placed it in my lips and told me to go ahead, you didn't mind, and lit it for me. You seemed so out of it this morining. Normally, you won't let me do anything when it comes to your unhealthly habits. You ascribe it to the idea that you're selfish and don't want to share, but I felt it was obvioulsy from the start that it was more of a sense of protection-or a want to, anyway."

The words didn't surprise him, even as he was gently pressing lips together with a subconscious and gentle tenderness around his teeth, which were poking nervously. He felt something physically break inside him, knowing that you could have been wanting to know that this could be something that would be a silent moment of tenderness between the both of you; but only if he were willing to allow it to have the vulernabiltiy to be. You paused in the way your fingertips were caressing his palms, almost as if in a soft rytham of attempt of reassurance for yourself, until Bojack, even with the feeling of his heart rushing, reached up towards the the side of your face with the hand that was intertwined into your fingertips, taking the side of your pale cheek beside his palm.

"Maybe I was just in the mood to stop being such a greedy and selfish asshole for the night."

You allowd your cheek to ease fully into his palm while your head turned to the side of his entangeled feeling of his palm beside your cheek, the weight of your exustion pressing beside his hand, and he caught his lips against yours for a moment; it simply came over him, as natural as it came over him in the pain he felt to not. You paused; until you gave a soft mumble of a word and turned your head up to meet beside his lip; and he gave a slight release of a breath while he sighed and felt the hevainess of his sickness as a person breath beisde your lips as the weight of your cheek met beside his palm, and he eased his snout away for enough inches that you could catch the tenative, desperation glaze in his eyes while he met the sickness of yours; and yet it was one that he felt was far more curable than this.

"I felt it this morining. That something was off, and you didn't want to tell me. Something insecure, and entangled, and deeply wretched inside of you, the way it is with anyone who strays. I want you to tell me." Your head titled up to meet Bojack's wet eyes, though your cheek kept laid in his palm. "I want you to be honest with me. I need you to be."

"I don't-" He cut his own words off with a sigh as he turned his wet and insecure glazed eyes away from your expression; there were entire worlds of problems inside of them too long and hevay for him to have a hope of curing them, and somehow that gave him more of a tender need and attraction more than he knew what to do with.

"Of course you did." He released his prde now, shackled and undone as he turned his tender eyes back to your own quesitoning ones. There was a somber vulernability in him as he turned to yours now, even with his pain. You know me. And that's something that I've always wanted out of someone."

Your pupils dialted in quick but compact thought as your expression snapped between his. "But?"

He sighed, ears lowered, and his air and disposotion just as aged and clumsy in its execution as much as he felt it.

"But as it turns out, it's also something that's a double-edged blade." He winced further as he drew his attention back to your eyes. "But you;ve been doing it better than anyone I've ever known. And I don't know how to handle that. I don't know if I want to."

You paused in your words for a moment, a brief hitch of consideration from the desperation of Bojack's layered words, though your fingertips didn't leave from intertwining beside his palm. He felt those questions that would lead to either his awakeneing or detriment as to how he had revealed himself to you earlier than morining in his insecure detriment, and he knew for a fact that you were used to living without being able to speak your obserations.

"If you hadn't met me, do you think that you would be doing all this right now?" Your eyes turned up to Bojack, lips parted in mdithought. His expression was even more tenative as he spoke, " I mean, putting up with all this. Would you be doing this with someone else, dealing with someone who is just as much trouble, or do you think you would have figuered out somewhere else to be by now, not even worried about my own thin?"

"Don't do that. Don't start comapring yourself to people and situations that don't exist."

"How can I not? I don't know how to do that. Comparsion of other terrible possible siuations is the only way I know how to deal with it. It's all I've ever had. And most of the time the thoughts and narratives end up either true, or worse. So-" He pasused as his wet eyes met yours. "I'm not sure what you want me to do. This choas-" He lifted up a brow dryily as he gripped his fingertip beside the tatterd hole of his clothes while he looked at you dryily. "-Is just one of the countless things you could sense or be worried about. Just for refernece."

His voice was soft, giving away a vauge trembling inside his voice despite confident stoitc grace that seemed as if it was a physical manifestation of a genuine lostness in him of what to do or how to do it.

He could see in the compact emotion of your eyes that you were wondering about him, and he hated that, but there was something that was too greedy, or rather blackly depserate for the humajity, for him to take you away from it. You wondered just how much the swan and her temptation of her cheapness as she had wrapped herself around him was still dressed around his body and on the inside and the out, how smart you were to be able to put it together, right down to his emotional detriment of why he had done it and how it was wrecking him. You knew that you were seeing right into him, a huge part of the reason why he admired you, and the fact that he couldn't hide from you, even if he wanted to, was part as to why he felt so spoiled to a degree that he knew he should have felt guilty; but he couldn't even begin to bring himself to; he had been too needy his entire life, too unseen and disconnected, starved, in a sense, and he wouldn't have had the strength to make you stop hurting yourself into his own corner of detailed mechonly even if it had harmed you; it would be far from the last time he had. He knew you smart enough to reconginze that you were getting yourself into troubl even more than your usual, twisted into the exact way he would want it in his clumsly gentle but ulaitely toxic detaield narrative. To be able to be seen exactly for what he was, and to get what you deserve; two contradactions.

"It must be lonely to be as wise as you are. To see the details of the way people are and how things actually are-to actually see things." His eyes turned down as he gave a small shurg of his shoulders. "I'm sorry I gave you so many things to have to wade through."

"Sweetheart."

Your voice is breaking, and even as Bojack winced in something that seemed as if it wasn't just a repulsion towards the sentiment of being loved in the way he needed; there was too much soul and emotion in your voice that was further than he felt he deserved. It was going to break him up from the inside out-the idea of not being able to own up to someone who could be worth being seen. His fingertips came to play beside his wrist as he gave a squeeze.

"You're worth more than your mistakes and your bad phases in life, Bojack."

"I don't think you know what you're talking about. And I wish I could tell you that you're right-but. There's a reason why people feel like there's more..emptiness to the world than others. People can only see the world as far as they have to offer. And mine is-blunt."

"That's exactly what I mean. You don't have to know how to do anything. The entire point of me..wanting to know ho to care for you is to make sure that I can help you through everything that we don't understand. I don't love you because I know everyrhing about what you are or why you are or what end it will lead to."

"That would explain you being here to begin with, then.

"I love you, in some ways, because I don't."

Bojack pasued as his eyes were hooded and dim, and he only managed a small inward breath as he rolled hs shoulders.

"I know that you think that you know what that means. But everything is sick and feels terrible because there's some core of something that couldn't be worse at the start. You can't make something good out of something intieonally became sick. It's never going to be good."

"My entire life has been trying to wretch something out from bad." You didn't step to him all the way, but you stayed stood in front of him as your body swayed, hands still gripped into the front of your body. "I might know how to be able to do it more than most."

Though exhusted eyes were all that met it, as much as a tired rasie of his lip, there was some slight lightness in his expression as he met yours. "Like the way that you don't understand what it means when you say you love me? In contrast to knowing what will happen if you do? Is that how complicated this whole romance thing is? Because it seems like it to me. It always has been for me."

"Only if you make it complicated."

"That occcured into an astounding sense of entangelemnt a long time ago."

"But it dosen't have to stay that way."

"Dosen't it?"

He gave a soft wince as he met your eyes, and he could tell that he was building a well between yourself and your want o help him. His eyes turned down as he gave a somber reflection of his air.

"I don't feel like anyone can belueve in anything or actually be happy unless they have this…foggy detachment in them, or stupitty, is more of the way I like to call it. There's a groteustue naivety to people who believe in good things and things that lead to it, and I don't know if I can ever get myself to wherever those people are at."

"It dosen't have to be all bad. And that's coming from it."

"It's not bad." Bojack's hands rubebd beside his arm, his eyes somber as his expression eased down into thought. "It's not bad as much as it is just-the truth. It's up to you how you want to see it, dress it up, or make it, but its going to lead to the same end regardless."

"If it dosen't matter how either of us sees it, then it dosen't matter how we go about anything else. What I want is to just do it with you; anything, in general, that I can. I don't care what it looks like."

"No." Bojack's ears flew down as his hands came to grip beside his chest. "Why?" I'm giving you a start for a better life. Or at least-a life. Why does it matter about being involoved with me?"

"I have nothing to lose. And I know, in your own way, you don't, either."

"No. Stop it. Don't cheapen yourself like that."

"Would there be another way as to why you decided to take in a danegrous, homeless woman on a whim."

"Please. That's amateur compard to what I could do or have done."

"But you did do it. And I'm still here. And I know that if you wanted the emptiness and freedom again, you would take it without resolve or without fight. But you've stayed with me."

"I just feel like it's a good time for the both of us to help one another, is all. But I'm doing my part of telling you-it dosen't have to be like this, with you getting involoed."

You were stopped a few inches in front of him now, and Bojack was curled inside of himself, his eyes dim and his expression tense as he watched your body, slender and sleek and relentlessly femeinine in comparsion to his stout body, step beside him, head turned down. Your hands reached out to his wait, and he felt himself give an abrupt breath at the feeling of your hands curling around his wasit while gliding along the tattering of his clothes and hood, then caressed it up around the edge of his stout body and over to the age of his bloate cheeks around this face. He allowed it to happen, and he could feel the sensation of your hands threaded beside the heat of his skin.

"Do you smeel her?" He asked it somberly, tenderly in question of resolve as his insecure eyes follwoed where yours seemed lost in thought while your eyes threaded against his snout, as if you wre taking into an overpass of the map of his emotion. The light still relfected across your face as your hands caressed beside his cheek, your lip pouted up as you did so while your expression turned across his snout.

"I do. I could smell her on you the second that you walked up to me by the archway."

"And you're-ok with that."

"Not at all." Bojack felt a jabbed intenstiy of a black in his chest. "But I knew, felt, to some extent how this was going to be."

"I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one."

"I feel like we see the deepest part of the nuances of why we suffer together; the small narratives of emptiness and the trails of probelms that most people dismiss out of laziness or lack of compassion. I've never found that. And I can tell just from the way you talk and act that you aren't, either."

"Of course not. But me being pleased or not wouldn't be the point. Your saftety is."

"Stay still." Your hands were stayed beside each one of the side of his face, and his eyes closed as he felt the sickliness of his own detriment eased beside him, but it was smoothed through the feeling of your palms beside his cheeks; there as a smooth surrerality to it, and he couldn't dney its sweetness, nor the sentiment of what you were executing in your own world as it met his.

"Ok. For now. But we are leaving-as soon as we can. I want to make that clear.

"And go where? Back to your house-the very place you're so ashamed and scared of me being apart of?"

"No." His voice was pipped up, edged, and even as his ears perked up, they lowered in an exhused underitny. "I don't know. And I'm tired of it."

'Then don't know."

A treamor of his features overcame his expression. "How?"

"I don't know, either. But I think being in rhythm with that feeling is what feels the most natural and smooth-and I don't think that's for nothing."

"Yeah. I get it."

The sense of his own desperation was coming through the gripping of his palm that was holding a little bit too harshly on the side of your wrist, the way that it always did. He found that you didn't care, and more than that, you found that you enjoyed it- it's intensity seem to match your desire to simply be and to take care of him, to love him as much as anyone ever had.

"I want to believe you, you know," he said after a minute, eyes closed as he felt your palms smoothing beside his cheeks. The muscles on his face treamored as he felt his muscles soothe under your touch, fingertips and the tips of them caressing and threading beside his skin and the soreness of his troubled muscles under it. "I know I don't deserve to say that right now."

"You never think you deserve to say it."

"Yeah, well. Exactly."

You're words weren't accusatory, but rather were accompanied with a reflective sadness. A small bitterroot and ironic smile dress up against his lips as he seemed to fall into the caress and guide of your hands beside his cheeks, and odd meditation and contentment easing across his features as he felt your hand glide beside the aged bloating of his cheeks.

"Yeah," he said after a minute, as if coming into agreement of what was spoken previously. "Maybe because I never do."

There was a slight surprise when he found that you didn't say anything to protest against it that time. Now it was his turn to try to read exactly what you were trying to speak with your subconscious silences, ones of which were speaking small messages of something that seemed to stretch out longer than he wanted. He knew that he wasn't in any place to try to push you for the truth or what you were feeling; he had too much cynicism and loathing to try and grip for that. But he also knew that you weren't exactly known for having any kind of self-control when it came to telling him how you felt, and the silence that followed made him fele more panicked wandering lust rather than the silence where he was allowed to dress up any narrative he would have liked.

" I hate it when you talk like this," he said after a moment, a vague challenge in his words, but no doubt a challenge more for himself than anything in regard to you; for your own part, you seemed extensively confident, at least in regards to the emotional wisdom you had with cradling his fragile insecurity.

"Saying things how they are and how I feel them?"

"Yes." He paused at the blunt response of his answer, and he was grateful to have this eyes closed; he felt your fingertips continue to thread beside the muscles on his cheek, and he felt the blunt end of the way he spoke and the unforgiving emptiness it left on the other side of it, and he felt himself scrambling for any kind of explanation. "Not because I hate you."

"I wouldn't be able to tell, at times. Not with how grumpy and coded you get."

Bojack felt himself give a vague and intense intake of a breath, and his timid shame showed across even with the emotion of his eyes closed.

"I'm sorry."

"I would believe you and how convincing you are, if it weren't for the fact that I feel something beyond what you say and show me. I don't know if you want to or if you mean to, but I find it not especially mattering. I feel it anyway, and I'd like to believe that you can accept it."

"I like you because you say it. I like you because it's you that's saying it. I feel like I've been on a journey my entire life of trying to process being ok with isolation, disappointment and stagance, every day. I try to have something inside of me to help me through it, but; it's always been too obvious. You can't think or reason your way out of your emotional needs suffering, you just can't. Your situation is your situation, and I could never..think myself out of isolation before. Of feeling like I needed to convince myself I didn't need to enjoy or hear anything from anyone. That I could, eventually, find peace with my insecurities and the way that I felt alone without input or healing from anyone else." He opened one eye, squinting through the puffiness of his wrinkles and puffy bags as his teeth poked, part in his jaded and grumpy fashion, the other in the poke of his aged timid wear. "I never did."

"That's ok." Through the peeking of his eyes he could see the heated warmth of your own while his eyes met over to yours; that soft cradling warmth of your expression that left way to be able to express and clear his headspace as he looked you over through the puffiness of his expression. "I don't think there is one direct answer when it comes to anything like the journey of emotion."

"I've never enjoyed the source of where it came from before. And for once, I enjoy where it's coming from. And I hate that I know that's going to happen if I can't find a way to try to convince you otherwise to not get entangled from the trauma of being homeless to another."

"I know you think you understand what it feels like to see yourself on the same level as what I've been through-but no matter how lowly you see yourself, I promise you that it isn't as bad as what I've been through."

He's smirked. "We'll see. Kind of what happens when you end up with a lost cause. And this-" He took his hand beside your wrist from where your hands were cradling the side of his cheek, pulling down the meditation of your hand with a soft ease as he indicated towards his battered clothes and the swan's scent and entanglement against his detriment. "-Is what happens when you allow a lost cause to follow you and fall in love with you, anyway."

"I've never had peace a day in my life, Bojack. I've never been at rest; in the moment, in rhythm with it. I've only ever had the idea of it to carry me through whatever unwanted scenario against my every need-and at times not even then in that escape. I know many, if not most, also feel that way. But individual experience is a vast and complex experience in contrast to only hearing about others' suffering.."

Bojack's eyes were wet in that spiritual and tender way of exhausted resolve of his worry as he looked you over; he knew he was outside of his emotional leave in more ways than one, and it showed in the slight dry detachment of his eyes; but still was that rich end of resolve in his expression, tender and worried as he looked you over while he tried to find even a few words to meet the small staircases he needed to get to to find you eevn halfway.

"Is this the part where we both start boring one another with small talk about things that I only half understand in regards to your experience while I act like I have even half the worth or consideration or understanding to make it easier, or are we going to talk about that thing that I definitely don't want to talk about but should?"

"What's the difference?" The life in your voice as your lips raised up and met your eyes had just enough zest and carefree nature to it that it caused the wet of Bojack's tender eyes to ease down as his ears lowered, and he gave a small breath, more of a sound of a detached agreement more than anything else, as he shrugged his shoulders.

"Yeah. What's the difference."

There was a select and tender consideration of Bojack's muscles contradicting underneath the feeling of your hands as it raised up to meet his cheek again, and his hand stay folded beside your wrist as you lifted your hand upward to ease beside his skin-he couldn't find the self control to resist you, after all. He felt the way that you gently fluttered your fingertip underneath the feeling of his hands as you were adjusting yourself further towards the intimacy of his stout body.

It was just even that little bit of the tension of a profound sense of compact emotional meaning that was between the both of you that he had sensed before; demanding in its tension, tangible and both fogging his mind with emotion while also giving his straight and sharp answers about what felt right. He hadn't realized that he was too far gone inside of his own entangled narratives to both deny you and to resist you, but just aware enough that he could manage to be aware of the black shame that came over him for every time he let you in. He couldn't give you anything that you could have deserved; he couldn't have even managed it with a normal woman, much less with yourself, the dirty and grit grim of society with no benefit to draw attention to, and even less of a reason to put anything into your disposition or your character; no coherent worth on the surface, but the amount of suffering you had gone through and something in your eyes made him feel as if there was a universal debt to be owed to you, and one he was touched and longed for to give.

You turned your head over towards the side as he continued to gave you through the small squint of his poked eye, your vision still reflecting slightly up against the light of the galaxy that was enriching even further the emotion in the front of your vision.

"I can smell her on you." Bojack tensed at the words. You sat with the words with a cold detachment-as if you were speaking something that was as mundane as that of the irrelevancy of the atmosphere of what was surrounding the both of you.

"I don't know-" He took a breath before he could allow himself to speak that sentence again, attempting to find words in the middle of his disassociated panic, where words were weapons of the next things that could be destroyed, more than likely. "I get it. I know. And the fact that you see that just makes my very point."

"I could see how much more tattered and battered your body was when you rushed your way down to hallway to see me."

"Yes, well-"

"Lipstick on your face, tattered mane. Was as obvious as anything-"

"I am so sorry."

"-But then, you were more than likely too high or on crack, just as you are now, to even come close to realizing that."

His eyes opened up now fully, dull and lifeless in the extent of his challenge; not because he didn't feel or know as if it was deserved, but because there was an extent of an extreme amount of unforgiving black edge to the way you, especially, were speaking to him.

"Yes. That is exactly what I was trying to talk to you about. And if I am really that bad, is the way you're going to deal with it to make it go away and to try and pretend like it never happened?"

"Only when you're so drunk you can barely even sense what's happening around you."

"So-always, then."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." He gave a small wince as he looked you over, ears lowered. "You do know that this isn't just a one time thing, right? And that being drunk or on drugs-all that really does is just bring out what was there in the frist place. We're clear on that?"

"Incredibly. Never been more clear."

You spoke the words with a mirrored sort of sadness, as if you were reflecting the sadness in your tone in observation of Bojack's frustration-but he could still sense that same feeling of you detaching yourself from the situation of much you should have been scared.

"Life is stagnant and mundane-and thank God it is." Your fingertips began to travel down from Bojack's cheeks and over to the bottom of his snout, only a few inches away from his lip; the part of him which was sore from the way the swan had crammed her lips onto him, within only a few moments herself more draining and rough more than you had been in a wekk-the rejuvenation of your touch beside him now only made him give out a small rasped tone, low and considerate, and drenched in shame as he felt your fingers thread beside his lip. "The stagance is the only thing that helped me keep my head when everything inside was more overwhelming than anything I could come to know to deal with. But there's something about the stagance of life that is also constantly challenging our souls and what is inside of us; just enough desire for what this existence has to give for us to crave certain things we will give out with without. Before, it was the smallest things; a meal that I could get to, a few dollar bills for my first warm meal in months, the feeling of having somewhere to lay at night. But around all those times and those hours was I always spinning with the idea that I craved or wanted something more, something to physically grip onto that was destroying me from the inside out for now having it. The idea of me not being there as with you, not just today but every moment where things were nothing but a muggled flogged pain, and the idea of you successfully pushing yourself away from anything I could give-that's my greatest fear now, because I don't think everything I was or am before and what I feel now isn't connected."

The silence was all you needed to speak after the firm statement, nothing except for the much more indifference as they walked their way past the both of you while finishing their entertainment; never had either of you been so aware of the emptiness caused by trying to connect with them other than each other for reasons that were too unfathomable and more than likely devastating for either of you to be concerned with. The cackling and threads of people's consideration from behind the atmosphere continued to thread through the air, and Bojack was tempted to use it as a crutch to distraction; to lift his head up, to speak a word to someone down the hall to catch even just a thread of that cheap destruction again. As much as his own self respect, or rather lack of it, had long since fallen into a black loathing of the fact that he had never displayed or worked for any significant character attributes to get the love and attention he desired, taking each day through the black loathing, too sick and exhausted to do much about it, and taking the tightropes and swinging through them in the only was he knew how to of going from rope to rope of other people's quick lack of attention was something he had used to survive something that he knew could have stood for "good enough" in regards to the fact that he was lucky enough to even get that much in the extension of his undeserving nature.

But you spoke the question that he was scared to even hear or to think you would speak, and yet still knew he needed, and in some aspects, wanted to hear more than any kind or soft word. With the dense emotional connection the both of you had, Bojack was convinced you were the only one to be able to give him the answers that you were giving him just from presence and touch and that soft look in your eyes; but the one simple question of whether or not this time he had gone too far was spoke with a simple and blunt wording, and causing his timid relieving heart to give out from the question.

"Why would you do that, Bojack?"

He felt his lips press together, then opened them again as his teeth poked in his delicate uncertain resolve, his mouth dry as he looked down at you with his eyes widening; though mostly did they simply obtain a small and dry guilt that spoke that he as far from surprised he was facing the question. He could feel the familiar sense of a pounding on the side of the front of his chest-like stones being raised around the front of his body, and he knew the pressure all too well, and part of him wondered if he would fall into his own blackout physical attack the way of which he had done times before.

"You want to know the truth?"

"Every moment. Every thought, word. Life is a timeline of constant healing, and there's so specific way of going about it. I don't know if this is the right way or even close-but I'd like to be able to try."

"It's just too easy," Bojack said after a second. "It's too easy to push you away. It's too easy to show you that it's not worth it. This, me, isn't worth it. Everybody leaves and nothing works out eventually. At best, things are even harder than they were before, but at least everyone is-gone and they can be left in the stagance of trying to pick themselves up again. And even if it was a good idea, it would just be waiting till I got to the point where it never mattered. Where we both never matters-time passing, me being old and god knows what my mom and dad passed onto me. There's too much struggle and too much strife to get to somewhere with someone even halfway worthwhile, and by the time you're there, it seems like nature has its way anyway. I try to be excited about being apart of the unpredictability of being alive, but-it's too exhausting. And I've found a lot of stagnancy in being aloe lately, of having every day be so the same that it's like I've lived the others before they happen and all the years after. And you know what? I'm as happy as I could ever hope to be."

" You don't believe that."

"What if I do? What if I do believe it?"

"Because you took me in."

His eyes flashed with unreadable emotion; but someone as naturally humbly human and endearing as Bojack couldn't hide the flash in his eyes that came along with an excessive amount of insecurity.

"I wanted to try and help you."

" Because I can see that hope in your eyes whatever you talk about things, even if you don't realize it. You say that you don't want to believe in anything, that you think that stagnant indifference of waiting for the nononsensual end to a nonconsneual ending is the way to go about life, but every now and then you have this way of bringing out a certain kind of life to you that reveals just how much you really do want to at least try. But you keep allowing yourself to be defeated. You don't like yourself enough to even try at the idea of happiness."

His hands came to raise onto yours, and rather than sinking into your touch and accepting it this time did his fingertips thread beside your hands as he began to detach you away from his snout.

"Then why do you think I brought you in, if I was such a coward? Why do you think I'm not content and reassured enough in my solitude that you're just a woman I'm trying to help without having to worry about getting involved?"

"Because you hooked up with a different woman tonight."

"Yes. Exactly. And-"

"And I know that in your own way, that's the loudest and most straightforward way that you know you're in over your head-and that you know you've been touched by something you're afraid of."

His ears splayed back further, and he began to shoulder himself away from you, a light of fight in his eyes while he tried to fight off another panic attack that came from too much emotion and truth at the same time more than he knew what to do with; that he knew all too well that came from someone that didn't know him the way that he needed, which has been the case with almost all people in his life, if not literally all of them; and the most baffling part was that you were the opposite.

The unknowing and lack of understanding made him uncomfortable, in a way just as destructive as the opposite where he had never been seen or wanted to be seen at all, but with an entirely different core. But the way you were talking to him now, it almost felt as if he was being physically overanalyzed for all that he was worth over things you didn't understand. He knew his habits, and his confidence in them wasn't for nothing.

"Ok." His eyes closed as he tried to reground himself, then took his fingertips outside of yours entirely as he began to detach himself. Your eyes were bright in something between surprise and question as his expression lowered as he began to detach himself from your fingers entirely. You allowed him to do so, though that intense baffling extent didn't leave your emotion as your eyes fluttered up to his more dry ones now. "This was a bad idea. I'll admit from my end that I went in and over my head, and that's not your fault." His hand came to ease beside your back, and you tensed as you felt Bojack's hand coming to guide behind you. He indicated his head to the front archway. "Let's just go back to the car and see what happens from there. You can sleep in my bed and I'll take take the couch, and we can talk in the morning if you want to go somewhere else or work anything else out."

But your body cringed away from where Bojack's hand was attempting to ease beside the middle part of your back, and Bojack could already feel a tense and knowing tension. All the parts of his character from the past intermelded with his present self as he felt himself constantly battling for any extent of peace with the mirrors of his past self that were still just as present in him as ever, and he felt his annoyance and frustration grip up to a heightened leverage when he saw the tension of your expression.

"Why are you doing this?"

"What?" He didn't bother to keep the edge out of his voice as he indicated his annoyance over to the archway. "Taking you back to the car so you have something to call shelter and home for the night? You're right, what a monster."

"I'm trying to understand why you did what you did tonight. To help you ease yourself into understanding; for the both of us. But you keep going back and forth with this idea that its within you, that it was the best and you had no choice."

This time Bojakc didn't bother to keep the deep wrinkled hard flair out of his expression as he gave you a jaded wince.

"I didn't realize that being an addict was something that I was able to turn on and off like a light switch depending on my given day or the people surrounding me. I'll make sure to keep that in my drug addict textbook next time to make sure that I can turn off the off switch so that my girlfriend can be comfortable with the way that I go out and try to deal with it. "

"You know that's not what I meant."

"Is it? Because I'd roll my eyes all the way to the back of my head at this point if I were to meet one last wannabe halfway partner to think they know me because I took them in and gave them a sweet house for a bit. You're welcome, by the way."

"You know that's not what I'm here for. That's not the reason why I'm here, or why I've been with you for this amount of time."

"And you trying to come around and to put these holes and strings into my hands and body because you think that you spent just enough time with me to make yourself think you found a new fix-me-up to try and make me function to make yourself comfortable with what you think is the idea of what someone should be. " His ears were flown all the way back, hands curled beside his hips as he looked at you with his stout resolve; the fire in his eyes was contemptful but thoroughly genuine.

"Bojack, you can attack me all you want."

"I'm not attacking you. It's the truth. I've seen it dressed up in the way you're carrying it thousands of times." He gestured to you in a pointed, frustrated and exhaustive fashion. "It's not exactly something that I'm going to keep leaping for joy and bouncing from foot to foot to understand, and I don't see why that would I start now. This whole 'being a project thing' for some stranger to come by with. By the way, the place you're coming from in life is the most surprisingly to have this kind of reaction to anyone by a million miles."

"You need to stop painting me as something you know in other people. I never said anything about wanting to fix you, or anything that suggested any progression of anything forward."

"Yeah?" His glaring eyes eased into an aggressive squint even further. "Then what were you dong? Just trying to be able to poke around and at me for every way that I'm the bad one here that deserves nothing but suffering and terrible things? You do realize I'm more than likely the only one that will ever connect with you or even give you a chance to care about any connections with you, right? You can be as beautiful and as tragic as much as you want, wise and smart, and believe me, I know that you are. But none of that is going to lead to anything if you're just tripping over yourself and babbling on the streets for the rest of your life, to men that I guarantee will only ever see you as a fleshlight of their own amusement and gain."

"Bojack, all I said was that I smell her. I see her marks on you. I said it as a way to acknowledge seeing you as you are. Seeing you for what you re tonight. To let you know that I see you in your full way of how you are-and I tell you this so you can be seen and known for exactly what you are tonight. I only made a statement." Your worried, red and almost pathetically tender and wet eyes looked over Bojack's shoulder as you watched another couple go by, your words falling silence as your palms gripped beside your dress. "I'm sorry if even just being seen as you are carries so much with you that it carried all that baggage just for you to be seen as you are on default."

A flash of realization overcame Bojack as he heard your words, and the inward black chaos of his own terrible disgruntlement came over his eyes as they bulged for a moment hearing your words while you gradually brought clarity to what you meant. His tender resolve, drenched in worry eased down for a moment as his expression pouted in his exhaust as he turned his eyes forward, hand coming to caress by his arm. As painful as it was, the truth being aired out left plenty of room for reflection, and none for the heaviness of denial.

"Let's just go home." His eyes turned u, dry and detached as his eyes turned up to meet yours. He gave a small shrug while he met the wet emotional compact of your eyes. "Please. This is all a lot. I don't know if I can get to a point where I can even halfway accept what you're treating me like and seeing me as-I might destroy it before it gets to the point where either of us can stand-"

"Stop it." Your head titled down, your cut off not from a blunt anger but rather simply exhaust. As the last of the crowd that was walking through the hallway continued to pass down the walls as their voices trailed through the hair, the hallway becoming nothing but for the after presence of the lonely mundanity of those who worked there, there was nothing left except fort he vulnerable question in Bojack's eyes as he looked you over, your head titled down in what seemed like emotional exhaust.

But your head tilted up again almost instantly, and there was a new alarm in your voice, edged with a genuine insight, as you spoke; "How long have you been fighting my perspective of you?"

The question caught Bojack off guard, and yet he felt a slight expectancy as he heard the question; he was coming to know you now, and spending time with you almost felt as if it was the equivalent to spending time and truly feeling all of his own personal murks of wounds and experiences and his relenting setbacks; all painful or uncomfortable, and he didn't know if sitting and festing with it to the point of unfamaility was healing or if it was just complacency, but he did feel more familiar with the center of his own sickly self regardless; that bruised core of the hardest thing to come to terms with above all else; his own personal timeline of experience throughout his life of the mental illnesses and bruises and disappointments that led him to the sickest core of his own understanding and truth.

"What a stupid question," he said, almost chuckling slightly to get into the slightly more charmed way of things that made him uncomfortable with the truth of the question. "I was trying to resist from the second I even thought of love. I never really stopped. Have you ever thought, maybe, the reason why I go out and do stuff like this isn't for some otherworldly reason, not even for myself, but rather because it's not exactly considered normal for somebody to sit on their hands for the rest of their life in their isolated perfect paradise where they don't have to deal with anyone but themselves? It's not the drugs that's the problem, or maybe even the woman. It's not even really the alcohol or anything else that I could ever fall prey to. Those things are just vessels that I was to put some physical tangibility onto everything that surrounds me on the inside. If you put the focus on the swan woman, or the fact that I decided to get drugs inside of me tonight, then you may as well stop with the advice."

A shadow overcame the question in your eyes. Your emotion was lavished all of your face; genuinely taking him in with a guide of desperate wonder.

"What is it, then?"

"I don't know." He said it with more clarity than he had statements previously; this one seemed quickly but authentically spoken, clear that he had asked himself much of the same before. "But it follows me everywhere. So what do I do when I get so sick of that insufferable thing that I can't stand myself unless I take those pathetic physical little distractions?"

"So you went to her. You were there to get drugs, and you hooked up. When you could have gone to me."

"It's not-" He took a timid breath, turning his head to the side delicately as his compact worry overcame his aged features. "It's not like that. It dosen't feel like a choice, or like I'm trying to jab at you for something because I didn't see you as an option. I don't even register that, frankly. That it would even be an option."

Your eyes threaded down in a reflection of thought, though it was more somber reflection of something that was eased into a devastated disappointment where there had been at least the attempt to grip onto a sense of belief a moment before. He felt a frantic rhythm in his heart as he felt his disposition fight and wreck inside himself up and down his intense levels, keeping his hands beside his palm now in that apologetic and erratic sense in his muddled uncertainty.. He felt as if he owed it to you to mold himself as much as he was able to for this afternoon; he had wanted to to some extent when he had mentioned the museum visit, and despite his own selfish desires and the quiet black of his own detrimental insecuity, he had meant it when he said he wanted to do something for you; if he had allowed himself to believe as if he could. He was almost feeling like a child with just how much he wanted to find comfort in you, for him to resolve good to bring it from himself and over to you. Had there been something inside of him that had been practiced at being able to execute that want for good despite the fact that cynicism and deep depression had been all he had known, he would have spoke it.

As it was, he found himself stumbling over his words to the very little left by that point, especially involved in the edge of his drug addled effect, and the words came out as blunt and as soulless as they ever had, much to his maddening sense of frustration;

"I just want you to not have to deal with this. I tried to make it so that it wouldn't be your problem by going about everything I did tonight for a reason." There was an edge of annoyance to his voice even as he attempted to keep it out; his hands gestured in his frustration, eyes turned up in frantic hardened thought. "I have to be ok with myself even though I know that's not really something I can give to you in terms of it being a good thing. That's why I'm trying to spell it out for you that maybe it would be better if you didn't get caught up in this. I don't know how I could make that more clear."

The galactic lights, the projected small blue ones that were spinning into a soft epilogue of the show of what had occurred before that was now nothing except for the dusty and rumbled hallway now, reflected across your features as your lips parted, your eyes eased in thought, the fragility and cuts and bruises of your skin and the general pathetic wear of your skin and air that called Bojack to it more than he knew what to do with came him over as he looked at you with a wince. He gave a soft hitch, attempting to find words, but he knew he didn't trust himself nearly or well enough to even try now.

"I've found that falling into despair and of losing all hope is something that feels like a more profound meaning far more than just the small thread of complacency and dispoline."

"You don't-"

"I've had the feeling countless times; and I know even more have had the same feeling throughout the wreckage of history. Once you accept it, despair feels like the companion that was the only one ever on your side to offer you relief-the only companion that was ever even attempting to understand the way things felt for you, rather than being indifferent or part of the problem." Your eyes eased into a full expanse of something that seemed to speak beyond Bojack's understanding, at least in a technical fashion; as it as on a more wordless and spiritual one, he knew the hevainess of dispair and the emotional isolation of suffering he saw in your eyes all too well; and there as an odd eternal beauty and profound meaning to it, and something about the steps of what had been had for the both of you to get to that point that was private only between your journeys of pains specific only to the two of you. "I want you to know that no matter what, you can come to me, rather than have to feel that for a moment. I don't doubt that you have, but on a night or afternoon like today; I'd like to be able to think I can offer you some solace from it. I know it's impossible to go back to being as innocent as children again, carefree where existence still is as it is as adults but the only thing that changes is natural worth and carefree nature before the world destroys the life out of us and takes away the natural simplicity of life and our need to be apart of it, which makes us depressed and unsatisfied and empty. I can never change anything about the world at this point; no one can. But I can help you. And I'd like to, Bojack. And I don't think either of us has to know why. I only do. It's that simple."

His ears lowered as he looked in front of him, eyes expansive in their soft unknowing of emptiness; and yet for the first time did he feel the most unnatural and expected thing, and that was what felt like the physical proof of soul.

"I did try. You know-" He gave a vulnerable breath as his hand caressed beside his arm. "I want to try and believe I don't need much in life. I don't want to, because the more I want the more I can be manipulated; but I don't know how to go against the basic wiring I've been told for my entire life that nothing I ever am, or do, or be has or ever will be enough."

His expression looked endearingly and pathetically lost and authentic, his hands eased up in front of his chest into a prolonged gesture as to how and what he meant. Your head titled up further at the endearing nature of his execution, your lip raised up gently into that soft simplicity of natural good and innocence Bojack was so aware you carried; the way he was drawn into its natural lessons of the opposite of everything he had striven for, of everything you had that felt and more more sense than everything he had been manipulated into thinking he had to fight for.

"I tried to be anything other than Bojack."

'Why?"

"Because you deserve someone other than that. Honestly, if there's anything to go by how I've known you the past few months, you deserve more than anything or anyone of how this world is. It's superficial, fast paced, callous, people let themselves be destroyed by the terrible natures of things and no one, I, didn't do anything about it. I wanted to change that for at least one person, and when I saw you on the side of the street, I wanted to do that for you."

"You have."

"I can feel that I know it's not." Bojack's voice cracked in his somber low tone; one that spoke of a genuine despair as his voice cracked in someone who was only pure and capable enough to even execute the emotion and to feel and care about the problem in the first place. "But it all just keeps being the same. I always remember that I can't really love somebody the way that I am, and that you wouldn't want to be loved or cared about by somebody with the way that I am either." He gestured to you lightly with both hands, eyelids hooded and expression full of a genuine detriment of heaviness. "Even if you think you would."

"I wish you wouldn't tell me what I want."

"I know not because I know you, but because I know what human psychology is like, and I've already done this cycle and hurt too many woman to not tell you that what happened this afternoon is only a small silver lining of things will be. I wish I could promise you that it would be fair, or equal, or that it would make sense in the future; but I can't be one for lying, and I'm sorry."

You managed a shaky breath, and the emotion of exhaust in your eyes was something that spoke that he was crushing you even with the attempt of warning, and he felt his hands ease beside his arm as ears lowered. The way you were looking into him, compact eyes eased with a red despair of discomfort and a sense of what seemed like every particle on your face dressed and detailed with a narrative of shock, made him feel an odd compelling despair of wanting to unravel everything he knew and to go to you-far more than he would have wanted.

He turned his tired eyes over towards your form, and your own wear of hearing Bojack speak was betraying itself even as you stood; your hands gradually caught in the slips between your fingertips as you looked at him with your own inquiry of a wordless understanding of a ethereal exhaustion from being alive on earth as two tormented souls and beings, as the both of you could only understand within another who felt the same, and the defeat within both of your eyes; his truth was reflected inside of the start of your eyes at his words, and even in devastation was it clear you had made an impact on one another in a way too human to be seen as not compelling.

"I know I don't deserve to say this, and I don't know if I ever will, or if the way that people are if there's even such a thing as deserving much of anything." The muscles on his face trembled as he looked you over in his emotional overtaking, and the depth inside of himself made from true suffering was giving him an emotional wisdom that came out where previously his mold to superficiality like the sheltered people around him had been for the sake of fitting in had been. "But more than what I really want to say is that you look absolutely beautiful."

"Do you mean it?"

Your voice came out breathing the words of genuine inquiry, and for the first time did Bojack understand the undertaking of genuine depth and meaning behind words. His voice was somber, authentic, even toned in his own emotional exhaust as he spoke;

"Of course I do."

"Then say it. Say it."

"No." Bojack's eyes widened as his expression bulged, and his eyes darted to the side as he enfolded in himself, hands caressing his arm.

"Don't hold it back just because you think that you should say something else, or be someone else. Everyone else is rotting; we can both feel it."

"I obviously know that. There's no denying that."

"Then just speak whatever you want; even if it feels like the most ridiculous thing in existence for you or like it will destroy you. Maybe it will; for the both of us long term. All things come to an end at some point, and those that don't end in tragedy."

"Then what's the point?" Bojack's voice eased into a tremble, and it showed on the authentic look of his emotion that seemed drenched in his own torment.

"Because that's going to be both of our fate, anyway." Your wet eyes, the emotion in them made even more compact from how your eyes trailed over the hallway in some unreadable inner melancholy of reflection, looked over Bojack's shoulder, as if seeing some overpass of things for what they were and how they would be. "And I know that for while we're here, we should grip onto what we feel and what makes sense, because most things don't, and I know that neither of us will understand the future."

Bojack's eyes eased into quickened thought, pupils eased frantically in his consideration. He gave a soft wince as he turned his eyes up to you, ears lowered.

"Why don't you say exactly what's on your mind, then? And know that it's good enough. Because it absolutely is; and I don't know how to communicate that to you in a way that seems believable, but I do want to at least speak it and to let you know as best as I can. Which I know will never be enough, and no matter what wise words you say, we both know it." He gestured one arm even further to you, expression pouted and dim, but compact with his emotion; the kind that could only come from someone that somehow had the impossible rarity to preserve hope, despite everything around him obtaining for otherwise. "So go ahead. Because your eyes are already telling me everything anyway."

There was a pause from your end, and he could tell just from the look in your eyes the weight of what you were speaking, or wanted to; but something released inside of you, if only for the fact that you both held that detrimental understanding that the both of you read one another anyway, for better or worse.

"Loving you and being with you hasn't been easy. Not even for the past two weeks."

The tension was broken through the honestly, and something seemed to shirt in terms of that heavy air of reflection and tension between the both of you, but just as many answers came to clarity rather than the muggy fog of only wondering, and Bojack felt something inside of him release from that alone.

"First true thing that you said this entire conversation." His tension began to ease down into a resolve of acceptance, a softness easing inside of his expression as he turned his eyes away from you; both with pain and shame, while at the same time executing his gratitude. " If you want to keep going down the grocery list of the things I'm sure that you supposedly built up in the back of your mind just from having to deal with the strain of everything, the time of me bring on crack and dressed up in another woman's perfume would be the best time."

"But that's only more all the reason why I want to continue loving you."

That sent such a large erection in Bojack that he felt his head snapping back to you, whether he meant to or not, eyes wincing from his puffed and wrinkled age of his worry as he snapped at you with what almost seemed like an exhaustive flair of disbelief.

"Why?"

"And this point in my life, I know that nothing that reflects the raw truth of reality humanity craves behind everything that is worth it is ever going to be easy. And for all that I've been through and have had to survive, for every man I've met and for every unseen cynical narrative and of terrible unseen story from one person to the next, you're the one that I've been having trouble to understand. In regards to the way you make me feel, what you make me care about-everything."

"Thanks." His worn eyes turned back to the now vacant archway of the building.." I'll keep that on the back of my list of everything else to look back at when it comes to forms of comparison of how hopeless everything for me is. The fact that a homeless woman who's been in states of suffering myself or anyone I've even known could ever care to think about could be considered something that can't be understood. I wouldn't take that as a sign of anything good when it comes to promise of connection."

"It dosen't have to be a bad thing, Bojack-"

He raised a brow as he gazed back at you with a challenge. "No?"

"And anyway, it's just me. I'm the only one that feels this way; and I feel like the sensation is meant for the both of us, all things considered. And only for the two of us."

Bojack paused against as he allowed the hollowed sound of what came after the noise of the theatre and the previous mumbling of the people fall away into distance of the white stagance of the aftermath of the collected chaos, just interesting for collected entertainment to make them feel as if they had lived for the day. You felt like the notable opposite of that to Bojack; there was something fresh and explosive about you, something that only came from someone who had been forced to see existence for what it actually was, rather than the sheltered warm fog of rich comfortability that kept people from their genuine character or humanity.

"Look, I don't feel like you were taking this offer too well before, but I meant what I said when I told you that I can take you somewhere safe. It dosen't have to be my house, obviously. You've spent there long enough. But I can take you somewhere where you feel a little more at peace, calm, clear headed."

There barely seemed to be hesitant in your voice as you spoke;

"No."

Bojakc didn't bother to leave the flair out of his eyes as he turned to you; both unbelieving and almost insulted as he spoke; "Why?"

"Because the last thing I want to do is to give up on you. I'm not saying that it's easy, and I'm not saying that some days won't be as difficult as they are today. Most will, I feel it. But the fact you're standing here, now, even trying, goes to show that there is something; and its something that is indescribable. I feel it; the same way some things in life are too beautiful or tragic, as those things go hand in hand, to ever be understood."

Bojack's eyes eased down in somber thought. "I know what you mean. I mean-I probably haven't executed it as much as you have, but-" A small timid shrug, a rub of his hand on his arm. "Maybe."

"And as long as you are able to come back to yourself and carry that truth, no matter how terrible the world is or how much people want you to be as superficial as them, it's all that I care about, Bojack. You don't have to be anything other than exactly what you are and who you are. As it turns out, that's really are there is. The only other option on the other side of that is people who don't care about you, or ever will."

His eyes were empty in that timeless way that only came from human suffering as the spoke, vague tease in his tone, "You know that all on your own, huh?"

You smiled somberly. "In my own way."

His eyes looked over towards the front of him, where his vision was taken by the pale of your hands while your fingers inter melded into the spaces of your hands, eyes empty in that reflective way that recognized human suffering; then up to your face.

"I appreciate the openness. Really,, I, um-" He winced as he rubbed the back of his neck again, turning down in thought. "That's a small quality I never got from anyone else that I never would have taken for granted now."

"I think there's a lot that we've both found difficult with others that I can't see us having with each other. As long as we're willing to communicate."

Bojack's expression was temporary eased into a dispirited tension that began to release, and in its place was that humble, endearing humanity within him; a slight smile raised up on his worn and tired expression as he managed the small but compact question of;

"You think so?"

It was spoken with a certain lost innocence, as if he couldn't quite believe or understand the way where the conversation was going. But he certainly wanted to; and more than that did he want to have faith that he could be the core of something so surreal and good.

"Don't you feel it? Beyond something either of us can understand."

"You don't think I'm a complete loss cause? You think, somewhere inside of who I have been and who I am now and the technical logic of who I will be, there's no just more to get lost in."

"I think so."

The emotion on Bojack's face lowered. "Oh."

"It's a destruction, what I feel for you. It feels almost horrifying, in a sense, and if it weren't for the fact that I know my mind dosen't think clearly from the amount of abuse I've been through over the years and the drugs I've taken to feel relief and the men I've slept with and the amount of times I've slept on hard stone and physical wear on my mind, I would allow myself to believe in the observation I've had tonight that other people feel it, too."

"There might be something actually worth loving. You don't even look at me and think, not even just a little, like this much-" He lifted up his fingertips and pressed them far enough apart against each other to show off an inch. "-that maybe this guy isn't even worth it? And that maybe you can't see the same thing that everybody else did because you're desperate for any kind of relief from anyone who will take you in, the fact that it's probably just a last minute call to try and have an attempt of being saved from your worth the world told you you didn't have as the person you ended up as?"

"Bojack-"

"Because if it was the case of you trying to use me to feel good, you definitely won't be the last." One hand curled beside his hip as the emotional ease of regret flashed across his features. "And it never ends in anything what you think it will."

"I don't think anything." There was a breakage in your voice now, and Bojack's eyes lightened into a soft inquiry as he gazed at you with his own wretched expression. "And you don't know how I feel now, at the path I've walked, to get where I am."

"And that's the exact reason why I'm telling you you shouldn't do this."

"It will be the last time. For as long as you want me to be. Because I'm certainly not leaving anywhere. And I'm definitely not giving up on whatever it is that you want. Whatever that is. Even if you don't know right now."

You turned your head over towards the side of your shoulder as your chin rested against it, hands on the side of your arms as your palms grazed beside the fabric dressed around your body that hid how many cuts and bruises were beside your skin under the hood and the flittered and tattered dress he had given you; you looked beautiful and almost inhumanly fragile all at once.

"I'd like to go home," you said, simply. "And I think you know where that is."

He could have brought his body around you, could have overcome his own sense of betrayal and self-loathing to doing even that much to be able to offer you that gentle softness of protection you clearly wanted. But he only managed a small breath, wet eyes easing down, expression enlightened in exhaust, and yet there was a tender romanticism there where previously there only would have been dry uncare, the same as which of everyone that surrounded him

" I do know that I wish I could tell you this is the last time that I can see you feeling this way. That I could promise you that you wouldn't have too worry about falling apart anymore-that I could give you the parts of yourself that you think I'm going to make feel the most good without feeling like it's an ease of bullshit for the both of us."

Your lip raised up into a slight bitter resolve, though it was far more forgiving than the deniable and disgust Bojack spoke from his own end.

"Me, too." Your hands threaded beside the messiness of the layers of your rags. "I wish I could promise that as well."

Bojack grimanced; someone, your lack of ability to see how you made him feel due to his lack of communication felt like the biggest insult.

" I never feel good. With you-a little bit. Maybe. But if I never did, I want to make it clear that it's not your fault. Or maybe you just made it easier to fall into a denial that I am still capable of something like that."

"The more you deny yourself, the more we'll both suffer."

"What was it again, everything that you said before? Something about how I would ditch the next person that made me feel good for half a minute? Or was that just my own internal self-loathing I was pounding in my head or was it you, seeing me for what I was when you met me, because you didn't know how to socialize with somebody that you were clearly seeing right through when it came to his bullshit life? Do you remember that?"

"See?" You didn't miss a beat as you turned your head from where you were looking down the hallway, and that warmth of that some guidance of a pure insight was still present in your eyes as you turned back to his. "We both read each other."

"And if you did, you would understand why this is a survival thing for you. Which is-fine. But don't do the both of us the disservice of dressing it up as something it isn't. It's not right, and it's going to cause more pain long term."

"And yet, I feel like I've never really loved somebody as much as I loved you. Maybe if only for the sense that we're comfortable, understanding, in rhythm around each other. The fact that we love each other even when we don't even mean to. There seems to be an emotional wisdom when I'm around you that speaks of the journey of every day of life and it's challenges and rather than feeling bad about it, there's this grounded wisdom and understanding between us-but we need to keep latching onto it daily. God knows that I know this world won't do it for you. You feel to me like someone and something so beautiful that even though its the most exhausting that I've ever known to try and have it present in my life every day and to feel it, it's the most rewarding and worthwhile thing I'll ever know. I want to fight and scratch and get lost in what we have and to know it; troubles and trauma and ever challenge come."

Bojack gave a slight breath of frustration, his teeth poked as he turned his head to the archway; even the projected lights had begun to dull now into indifference, and the lights were starting to become dimmer and less drenched with energy. The exhibit seemed as if it was coming to its inevitable stagance close for the night, and though the both of you were free to walk around as you would have liked, with a few employees still taking to walk around the hallway, it was clear it was coming to an end for the night.

"Looks like the stars aren't still being spun out into the walls anymore. Probably a sign how much time we have left."

"All the more reason to go home, then."

" How long was the program going to last for? I could have sworn it went on for a few more hours."

It almost felt like it was his own personal beacon for him to be standing there with you, even though he'd already long since made up in this moment in the back of his head of what he needed to do. The only thing that he could have done to keep you, and in turn himself, even remotely sane after the dance that you fell into together.

"I'm ready to go home. I don't mind."

He wished you hadn't had such a naturally motherly, nurturing, welcome look of warmth on your features, with your hair spun out and with something so lovable, a sense of home of strength, in the way you looked.

Bojack only managed quick intake of a reset of a breath while he placed his hand on his hip, expression tense while he felt himself feeling and calculating the area. Part of him had wondered how long the program was going to last for, and he knew that in his own way it was in agreement with his own personal path towards making sure that at the very least, he would have an excuse to sit by you-if he felt he could handle it within the still wretched plans in his mind that he made for the sake of his own sanity; one of which was impossibly thick and dense in its tormented black execution of one who had lived and survive in nothing but position for so long.

He had already figured out what he needed to do and why, and the truth of it was pounding up around the back of his head like the tormented truth he carried inside of him, ironically the only familiarity and comfort in his life. But he wouldn't dare speak it aloud to you, and in some ways he wasn't even going to admit it to himself, not even internally; it would stay in the black of his most inner mind, the one that controlled him the most, and the one most unapologetic about his flaws.

"I don't know what to say." His voice cracked, lightly. He knew you wanted to go home; and he knew you deserved to be brought to a home, and more than that did he understand that with the plan forming in the back of his head in the only way that would make sense, you would be getting neither.

And he was, undoubtedly, too much of a coward to be able to feel guilty enough to deny the fact of the harm that would come from what he wanted to do for his own comfort.

Your eyes eased down again, and he could feel a black that came along with something not being as it should have been; of the inherent injustice that was following what was going on, but he couldn't manage anything except to be overwhelmed by it.

"I guess it's bittersweet, the way you seem to know me well enough to know when I'm up to something that I shouldn't have done, and when you know me well enough that you can tell what I did before I even told you. I don't even know if I should even try to say sorry. I feel like I don't deserve to tell you that either, and even if I did, we both know that I wouldn't be speaking it in a way that I need to. That would just be a waste of both of our time, wouldn't it?"

You let out a soft breath.

He didn't know whether to accept it, whether to take that as a sign that you agreed with him, or if he should have kept talking. Part of him felt too far gone within his resolve to be able to flirt with either side at this point regardless; his mind had been made in the inner part of his tormented wreckage, and he found very little to any desire to turn from it or change his mind now.

"I don't want to keep you sticking around with someone that you've already seen isn't you. If you want to get up and leave now, I wouldn't hold it against you."

"I wouldn't." Your eyes flashed as you gazed up at him, the emotion in your eyes compact with emotion, vague tease threaded in your eyes, though he knew the devastation behind there as easy as his own, and he hated how much he had an insight into it. "I wouldn't, and I wouldn't want to. And you feel that, too."

Bojack sighed, eyes turning to the side as he tried to grip his attention to anything other than the compact look of the surrerality of your expression, his fingertips taking to caressing beside his wrists. "I'm just saying, if this night was anything that you felt was difficult, it's not going to get any better. Or easier. And you need to know that. I also wouldn't hold it against you if you decided to blame yourself and internalized the guilt."

Your lips raised up into a soft smirk. "Are you that familiar with the routine of how you affect those around you?"

"That's the thing with me, right? And if you were anyone else, I'd let it happen. I'd be at peace, even, as long as I didn't feel too bad, and everybody else could get to do whatever they want since they never were especially concerned with me in the first place, and there's no genuine bond between us and it wouldn't be a loss-" He raised his hands up in front of him as his ears lowered, gazing at you with a reflective defense in his eyes. "-And I promise I always feel bad that you feel bad, too. You've been enabling me just for loving me. That is wrong with me. I can't be loved without being enabled. It's just like every other which successful guy that comes around-and I've come to realize that I don't get any enabling for telling you that, and believe me, I've tried to convince myself that it would make me feel better, and it never had, but-for the both of our sake-I'd like to be able to let you know, regardless. I don't even mean to do it, it just-happens."

"Bojack, stop."

"Stop what? Stop telling you what you should have known was true from the second you decided to become involved? I've been from countless I have nothing but bad signs and suffering moving out from my head like a waving sunbeam." He waved his hands in mocking, eyes wincing in anger as he did so, in his erratic and angered exaggeration as he showed off his frustration in a theatrical but somberly mature fashion when it came to the emotion in his eyes. "People like to think that everyone has their place and gets lovved and that this profound, amazing sign happens for anyone eventually; but I am telling you, I know from people I've met, from myself, that the reality is that some people get whimpered into nothing, and that's all there is. "I can-"

"When you first became involved with me, sometimes I wondered if there might be something that was mentally challenged about you. Why else would you get involved with this garbage? And considering where you came from, who you are, the level you have in life, I'd say it would be a decent factor of assumption."

His words were projected to you in his loathing and violence, but there was more identified loathing in the way he spoke more than there was of anything that was directed at you. Just as there was nothing but panicked chaos in the way he was in his turmoil and unconnected to the noise of the world, his words were a hab towards his own loathing and black fear; but there was enough of a delicate and abrupt reaction in your eyes that it cased Bojack to ease back in his air, his head jolting back as ears lowered.

"Do not want thi?" Your voice broke lightly in a way that made Bojack turn his eyes down with and wince, ears lowered further. "Because if you don't, you should have let me know the second that you started. But something tells me, especially one that I met you, that you didn't even know yourself what you wanted."

His eyes flared into an insult as he kept his expression down, and though the entirety of his disposition came from someone with shame, he managed a vague defense as he spoke:

"I was just trying to take you in, do you understand me? I was trying to do a good thing. I assumed that we were both on the same page with that."

"But you slept with me."

"Yes." His eyes lowered into a cynical emptiness. "Yes, I did. If you ask anything around you, you'll be able to get the confirmation that that is nothing remarkable. As a matter of fact, it would be more of a statement if I didn't,"

"You held me. We talked. You made me feel a certain kind of surreal beauty that came only come from truly being alive, and the most beautiful thing, even if only in thought; the connection of someone else, in their entirety of their story and intermleding and connecting with someone else."

"What do you want me to say?" Bojack's voice was somber and quiet in that natural delicate way he held as he eased his eyes up at you with a wounded flair. "That I'm grateful for this?"

Your eyes were eased into so much compact pain that Bojack almost felt as if he, himself, could have given out from that niche beauty that only came from two people that had the rarity of truly loving one another.

"I am."

"No, you're not." He gestured to you with a vague jab as his ears lowered while he gazed at you with a challenge. "You never were. If you were, you wouldn't have a problem with any of this. If anything, you would be fully welcoming it."

The nature of your expression became so disparaged, with that same impossible gentle ease in it of that nurturing motherly nature that it was more than he could take, and he felt as if he could have been taking from the inside out with some odd extent of surrerality of shock of depth and of being touched by you when he hear you speak; "Do you not want me?"

"Of course I do!" The words almost came out as desperate as he gazed at you with wide and bulging eyes, hoding a complete emotional vulnerability that seemed that took even him aback as he spoke the words with more passion of connection where there was previously only disgusted and disconnected dry exhaust of the people and woman he had ever known; tolerance for the sake of some blurry animalistic survival, more than anything, and he had never known that the amount of emotion in his intention now was possible.

"Look, I-" He paused as he rubbed his arm again, vulnerable eyes turning down as he did so while ears lowered as he managed a shrug. "I've spent a lot of time convincing myself that I didn't want or need, or even believe in anything other than the superficial. So much to the point that no matter how terrible it felt, how much I could feel something was so wrong that I didn't even want to think of it, that I still believed it, because it was the only thing that was consistent and kept with me. And every now and then, only from idea because I never had it in reality, but every now and then I could catch of glimpse of something that spoke of humanity, this profound, describe feeling of amazement-so full of depth that I can't even believe it even just to think of it. But I still convinced myself it wasn't something that I needed, or wanted; just small glimpses, like a quick good high that hits just right more than most. You taught me that there's something in those beautiful moments that can be consistent, even for me, even when I feel nothing but anger and detachment over and over again."

"So what?" Your eyes searched frantically across his; the pale of your skin and the flash of the galactic light on your features only added to the fragility of your beauty as you gazed at him with what seemed like a war inside of your fragility that he found both strengthen and worth protecting. "What now?"

"So-" His eyes turned in distant thought for a moment, expression furrowing as he did so. "That's all that I want. What we did-that was special and good enough for me."

Something gave in in your eyes. "Bojack-"

He raised his hand in front of him with the attempt of making a point; and to you, even that had the extent of his nature pure nature, buried underneath the tormented insecurity and the inevitable way the world corrupted and destroyed a person. "The fact that I even have to say this? It's something that I couldn't have been able to manage about a year ago. That I'm not sure I'd even want to. And even now, I want to tell you to stay. Even now, I want to tell you that I will definitely fall apart if I let you walk away from me now. Because I can't handle it without you, but I know if I say that, that's the classic way that I would've got about keeping someone out to ruin them- and I know, part of me knows at least slightly now as much as my muddled, confused mind can manage, that caring about somebody else other than me means in my case that I can't, I shouldn't, ask you to stick around. Especially when you don't know what that means, and especially where you came from."

"I wish you would stop saying that."

"Come one. You're from the streets. You probably wouldn't know anything good even if you had it, like most people. Real life is empty and stagnant and hard. But I am telling you, in my own way, me telling you this is me agreeing with what you want. Because for whatever reason over the past few weeks, I do care enough to not tell you this. And I care enough to tell you that I don't know if I won't fall apart if you walk out now, and that you won't be one of the very last things that's keeping me from wanting to destroy myself in whatever way that I can think of-and more than that, I'm telling you its not your responsibility to care. Which, if you asked any woman from my past, and I can give you the number of a few, believe me, you can ask them yourself how bad it is, this is the kindest thing for anyone I've ever done. All of it, really. From taking you in, to even concerning myself with you in the frist place. But it's all i can give, and no matter how disappointing that is for you-I'm sorry, but it's the way it is. So that's all there is. There's nothing left. If you know what I mean by that. I'm not sure if I do. I don't think I want to. But I think I do."

You feet stepped to the side, and your eyes darted to the archway beside you. Bojack's ears lowered, and he wished the crack had more affect on him than it currently did. Your hands gripped beside your arms, and he saw the squeeze of them against your body as you swayed, emotion in your eyes heated and folded into the void of your emotion; and he found it enduringly comforting, the rarest thing of all.

"I have nothing to lose, Bojack. I've never had anything to lose-and for once, I feel as if, even though maybe what I am to you is just a phase in endless opportunity, I still have nothing to lose; but for once, whatever it is you've given me, I want to endeavor myself into entirely. By making me go away, by putting wherever it is you think would be best for me to go-I promise you, all you're doing me is taking back out to the space of nothingness. I'm not like other people you know. I don't have a large business to go back to, I don't have a string of boyfriends or anyone in general that even so much as sees me as human. I'll go back to the sidewalk, and whether you feel cheapened or compelled or empowered by that emptiness, it still is as I am."

Bojack sighed again; no matter how much release there was, the tension and the marks of his age of a long life of the world stayed prominent. But a slight humor, and then an even more notable gentleness eased into his vision as he winced in that insightful humor as he gazed in front of him, tender laugh, smooth as he did so;

"I guess this argument would be a perfect example of how things would go, wouldn't it?"

A slight, much more reassured raise of your lip. "I think so. And I don't mind it at all; and for whatever opposite path we both took, they both seem to agree with one another for a reason."

"It is amazing, isn't it?" He walked to you for a few paces, that humor, eased into the puffy bags under his eyes and the light of the emotion of his eyes as he looked down at his palm, gestured into a soft cramp as he looked down at it while he walked his way to you. "I do want to hold you. Holding you was like nothing else I've ever known or felt. My entre life, I kept thinking that maybe there was the right person, and that I would just never know them-and all the other people I would never know of whatever they had to it all just seemed like fluff to me with no value in reality. Bullshit." His eyes turned up to you, handsome and grateful in his emotion,and the both of you drenched in your own world fabricated between the both of you. "I barely even have a problem with it until it gets to the point where it hurts too much. In some ways, I don't even feel bad."

You nodded, the action small but compact with understanding. "Because at least you hurt you before I could hurt you."

"No." Bojack's voice cracked, but there was too much of an odd devastation behind it for him to deny it. His eyes lowered, pout eased across his expression. "I mean-I wouldn't take that interpretation away from you if it made it better."

Your hands gripped beside the fabric that was dressed around your arms again.

"There's nothing else I'm made for, Bojack. Every moment of my life, every house; this is it. There's nothing to push me out for, nothing better to be invented."

The aged wear under his features winced, wrinkles deepening in his skin.

"I know." Although he was looking at you from the corner of his eyes, he didn't dare look at you directly, to the point where, whether he liked it or not, he could read the messages in your eyes; he would allow himself that much. It seemed as if it was physically looking into something that he loved too much to be able to follow me into his usual patterns of a indifferent indulgence dance, one of someone who had accepted the contempt of the world of saying his actions weren't good enough for a good life or respect; he was too tired to care, and the natural way of fate would either kill him or take care of him, but he wouldn't concern himself with it anymore. Something that he wanted was something he also knew that he couldn't quite understand how to even offer himself, and he took comfort from that feeling of emotional disability; he knew that much.

"I can't give you all the answers tonight." You're voice seemed to be slightly distant, even more than it had been from the start, although it felt now like the emotional detachment and absolute exhaustion that Bojack knew for a fact that he was running you through just from finally opening up to you about the way that he felt was running into the ground; and the black feeling increased that came along with his inability to execute his human needs. "But, Bojack-think about it. There was such a little chance that we knew or met one another,that we saw each other for everything we are and felt connected. There's so many potential people who could meet and help one anther, change one another with what they posses, and at best its connected through the most superficial small reminders of the person's existence than ever knowing them on that human level you've made me feel; beautiful enough that I can't even explain or understand it, almost can't accept it unless I can have it, because it would be too devesting. In this world it's the entire species denying their own humanity and robotic and terrible natures of lost people; and I'm one of them, and the beauty of human connection is so hidden and pushed off that its the core of all suffering. We have a chance to break out of that. We can make a mark."

"See-that's where you're wrong. I don't think that anybody can. Maybe that's part of the problem, maybe that's the reason why you should listen to me and get yourself out of here now." He hand pointed sharply over his shoulder. "I don't know where you can, go, but you can stay at my place still for the night while we try to figure it out. I won't send you out on the streets; not necessarily." His ears flew back in guilt, and the soft knowing began to become even more present in your eyes as you raised your lips up in knowing.

"But where else does a person go who lost their island or support and loved ones?"

"Yeah-I don't have that, either. And for whatever terrible reason, we were wired as humans to what this constant bonding that we suffer without-and believe me, I have." He pressed a hand to his chest, earnest look on his features. "The only different between you and me is that I have four empty walls to call home. I'm not in denial of that. I'm not as separated from the suffering as I think-and I'm not denying that, either. But it's both of our jobs to focus on reality."

"Nothing else is worth anything except for accepting that impossible and messy exhaustion and thread known as existence. No matter how terrible, that's all there is."

"Yeah, I know that. But-"

There was a sudden shrill sound of the swan woman again; Bojack's eyes dilated in panic as he snapped his head to the archway, hands gripped beside him in a tentative warning. Once he relaxed as he heard her voice beginning to trail back into her low talk again, Bojack collected himself, even more somber now, as if he was trying to come to acceptance of the constant thread of the proof of what surrounded him that came with a constant thread of a regretful life.

"-Before you get even more damage. There's about five hundred different things going around here that I could tell you right now, and most of them are going to be about my own self-interest. And the reason why I'm telling you now is because I got my fill of even this keeping me safer than you. I got my phone jamming my ass against the side of that woman that you smell of me, the same way that I did 15 years ago with another girlfriend that I had for similar reasons to you to want to feel relief for a little whole, , and the way that I did with the last person that I ended up having sex with, just getting off to keep my mind at ease of the last woman that I ended up leaving because she couldn't do nearly enough for me when she realized what she was signing up for, the same way all of them do-the same way that no one can ever love anyone if they ned or ask for too much, and I've done the responsible thing of accepting that. I can't lay on the side of the road emotionally while you sit in my house as we juggle back and forth about ho to dress this up of what is clearly too suffering people trying to make it work."

"You admitted it yourself. Why can't you just go for it?"

"I wish I could say what was happening here was special. I know I have. But I know myself, I know people, better than that. But even that would be something that would just be puffing up all the desperate ways that two mundane suffering people are trying to make each other comfortable."

Your own eyes closed now, drenched in their exhaust, and he knew now that he was doing the very thing he was both dreaded at happening when he had felt the grounding warmth of value of the delicacy of human relationship and holding you at night; of the feeling of preciousness he never thought he would even come close to executing. He knew that exhausted look all too well; Princess Caroline had vore that wear on her features, and he knew the black but numb overprocessed shame. With you, it felt almost unacknowledable.

"You're not a lost cause."

You said the words with a certain kind of confidence, although he felt as if he was physically being jammed up into a griphold from the way you were speaking them, as if you were physically entrapping him for every which intention he held to the core of what he was; a physical emotion he could feel with just as much impact, and some both harrowing and devastating reflection of reality and the acceptance of it of how you saw him from the inside out, and causing him to like he was standing up in front of himself and speaking something inside that he didn't want to see; not because he was scared of it, but rather because it was unfamiliar, and even worse, that it could be solved, rather than unsolvable rather than comfortability avoided.

"And that's exactly what happens when you allow a lost cause to follow you and fall in love with you anyway. You end up being lost in the middle of the lost cause and wondering why you feel that way. And believe me, you're not the first or the last to do that for whatever reason I can't imagine and to think its a good idea, either."

The galactic stars of the spotlight traced up against the the walls behind you as he saw the way that he seemed to be his own physical manifestation of torment through the bittersweet and almost unfathomable connection he had within the narrative of your eyes; it was the kind of connection that felt as if it could only come from a detrimental end of exhaustion of being on the brink of all knowable life.m

He turned his eyes back over towards at the slightly more enlightened space of the hallway in front of him. The rest of the rich had been content and done with entertaining themselves for the day, retiring to their fancy cars and with their champagne glasses placed into of their cupholders, as folded and only concerned with their own finite existence and fully and stupidly believed to think it mattered or how gritty and small and insignificant they were; saved from it, but to the detriment of the needy and suffering that Bojack wished he could get back-if he had ever had it in the first place, though now he was coming to grips with the idea that he had always felt that way, but had always been too much of a coward to act on the awarness; and even more to do anything to even know it was there; all of the torment, with none of the heroism; bad for bad, as it was with almost all things Bojack experienced.

"I guess if you're going to have the galaxy associated with trauma and intense talks like these, ot may as well be something that's as beautiful as this, right? Not everyone can say that."

There was a silence that came for you for a moment, and he knew now beyond doubt that he'd push you too far this time. A sickly kind of clarity overcame him to the thought of that-he was succeeding at chipping away whatever ethereal beauty the both of you shared, for better or worse; and yet it wasn't being destroyed as much as it was strained into a new type of beauty.

Your body began to sink down as you leaned beside the star ridden wall, and your body showed off its true fragility as your legs curled into your chest, the worry of the pale of your face executing into exhaust as you body began to slink on the wall and onto the ground, hands gripped beside your body. It was only then that, even as Bojack had come to his sickly but familiar conclusion of what he would do and how he would do it, he leaned forward towards you, pressing his hands on his knees as his ears lowered and plush stout body came to meet yours in his authentic apologetic eyes, plush body eased down as he kneeled in front of you.

Your pale hand was trembling beside your face, now showing more signs of stain and distress than you knew what to do with. Your lips trembled as you spoke;

"I'm selfish too, you know. Despite the fact that you've made it so clear that you don't want this, aren't comfortable with it, I keep pushing it, because once you've felt beauty like the way I've felt with you holding me, taking care of me, small little things like giving me coffee and food in the morning-going back to the lovelessness and the robotic superficiality of the world feels utterly fatal."

"Me too." Bojack's voice was kind, somber; enough for your eyes to ease up to his with a soft wet layer in your eyes as you looked him over. "But most people have to accept how small and unloved they are. Believe me, five hundred thousand twitter followers does not ensure a place on this earth." His palm, although tentative, reached out to thread onto your wrist; after you allowed yourself to release did he did it from where your hand was rested beside your expression as he threaded his fingertips beside your wrist, and pulled your hands down to your lap. "None of us win. But no matter what this world takes from you, you need to at least remind yourself that you deserve to be taken cared of and to have a place in this world, and you shouldn't blame yourself for how terrible things are for you. And you need to know that."

He saw the emotion in your eyes become more vivid as you blinked rapidly, the red edge of your eyes turing down to follow where his hand was guiding your hand away from where it had been gripped beside your furrowed forehead. He could tell you were feeling the way that your emotion were following the only place where you felt as if you had a place of genuine belonging; and that made him feel more endeared than he knew what to do with, and the fulfillment from it almost a promised caged that he knew he wouldn't be able to resist; he could pretend, and he knew he would, and Bojack was detrimental good at pretending.

It made him know that if nothing else, it certainly meant that all the cards on the table; you were wish, and there was a transfer of agreement between the both of you that there was something about you that could take care of him; and for one, Bojakc felt as if he could take care of someone else; and was genuinely needed, a mood of which was still foreign to him, and one of which even further he didn't know if he could accept.

"Ok." The wear of your eyes closed, and Bojack's eyes winced in that pathetic emotional exhaust as he watched your head turn forward. "I'll go, then."

Bojack felt his heart flip at the agreement of his insistence.

"Are-you sure?"

"Back home, I mean. To your house."

"Oh." Bojack's ears flew down. "Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course."

You were just about to get yourself up, even as stretched with emotion and as exhausted as you felt, while your hand kept gripped onto Bojack's, himself leaning backward as he gazed at you with that heavy conflicted melchconly, teeth poked, as if he wanted to speak something further.

"I'm sorry, Bojack."

Bojack's teeth poked as his eyes turned over your body, fragile and pulling up against yourself as your arms glided across your legs, caressing beside the rags on your body.

"You know you should be the last one apologizing."

His eyes lowered into his exasperation as he walked to ease his body beside you, eyes turning into a gleamed exhaust and of that compact emotional consideration as he looked you over while easing his body down beside your curled up form.

"I've been going on for so long of my life now that I got used to having no emotional connection. To have even the slightest hint of it now; I feel like its more than I can stand." Your head turned lightly to the side, chin rested beside your wrist as your eyes kept lowered down. The strangled mat of your hair fell in front of your face, the exhaustion and wear across your skin adding to your expression of detachment. "If I were to feel someone of genuine quality like the way I feel of you, I feel like I'll grip myself into it too deeply and with a certain kind of hunger that I can't deny myself. And it might be too intense." Your shoulders shrugged with a slender ease. "It's too intense, when you've gone for so long feeling as if you're the only person who wants love and compassion; humanity, and to feel it now almost feels like too much."

Bojack's eyes lowered further, eyelids hooded as his expression eased down to the floor beside him, still ridden with the galactic lights as they reflected across the ground; though it was clear from the sounds of the occasional muttering of the people from the back and with their hands playing with wires that they were planning on shutting down for the night, and he knew he only had so much time left to bide his time before his executed his decision into reality.

"I know what you mean." His fingertips curled beside his palm. "Believe me."

The silence between the conversation seemed to stretch down for too long, but he felt the way that your body began to shift underneath the weight of your thought and hesitancy, and his tired dry eyes turned to your body as you curled under the sheets and fabric, your pale skin curling under your dress ans fabric, and he could tell just from how you embedded inside of yourself that you were trying to prepare yourself for the possibility of spending the next phase of your life again out on the streets, and he felt an inward jab of red heat at that. Slowly did you begin to move forward as you kept your arms eased around your legs wile they were pulled to your chest, ragged and white rags torn and dropped from your arms and your legs as they moved under the delicately of your movement, keeping your arms wrapped around your legs in a fashion that spoke to Bojack that he could tell you were torn and huddled into yourself and were plenty used to navigating the concept of lack of home.

"Here." Bojack's breath and his words slipped out of his lips with an uncertain tremble, but the dry confidence in his voice that came along with lack of expectation of anything accompanied his tone as he reached his arm out to your shoulders to pull you in for a moment. "If we're going to do this backwards conversion thing of trying to communicate what's going on in our minds without coming to connection, we may as well release the physical stress of it a bit."

"Thank you." Your voice was delicate in a thread of a ease of warmth of gratitude, and Bojack only gave an ease of a grunted breath as you pulled you in.

Your arms released from where they were threaded against your legs as your body curled to the side of his body. His teeth poked as he began to feel that inherent sense of home and belief again at the feeling of your touch-your cheek that threaded beside him that was hot with worry and overthought, the feeling of your pale skin guided across the plush curve of his stomach while your body curled beside his.

"I know you won't let me come home. But I'd like to at least make clear, for the both of us, that that's why I'd like."

Bojack felt another black wave of shock ease over him, and he closed his eyes for a moment, hand threaded beside his snout as he felt a tension come over his features.

"You're serious," he said, looking over at you, expression furrowing in tension. "You're really going to be so much of a lost cause you are going to try to do this right now?"

"When you feel the way I do about the world and people for as long as I have, the only thing that makes senseis understanding that there's nothing but acting out to take care of yourself in extremities."

"After everything that I've done tonight, and everything I've told you-you're really trying to ease yourself into this terrible desire of thinking that there's going to be some sort of silver ;ining exception to all this, that it will somehow be better than where you came from because nothing could be worse? Is that it?"

"You have a lot to be grateful for, Bojack." Your cheek eased beside his chest further, body huddled against him, and he couldn't deny you, even as he felt a deeper extent of a wall of what was his black conviction of depression that everything had the truth of negativity to it-the expansive depth of life that came from the sensation of how you loved one another and touched into a wide expanse of life together was something he couldn't deny to himself, either; neither the pain nor the joy, a backhanded, cruel and muddling thing. "I know it dosen't seem like it, but every passing moment of a person's life has detail and a profound extent of their own personal richness both with tragedy and with joy and mundanity and everything between. The path I've walked is much more detrimental than yours. You don't know where I'm coming from with the things that I'm asking for."

"I get what you're saying. And I'm not saying I'm going to toss you out on the street." His eyes winced in his regretful nature as he turned his head to you, ears lowered. "But I want you to find something better than settling down with me-or even taking shelter with me. If you took it from the guest you met who showed up for awhile, Todd, he wouldn't hold back on telling you he agrees. That's not how it works. That's not how we do things. By 'we', I mean-everyone. And I can't not be everyone is everyone is shitty because-I feel like I need to be apart of what everyone else is doing. I don't know why, but-" His eyes were empty in that reflective and dilated fashioned as he turned his eyes in front of him in an exhausted ease. " I don't think that's how anybody does anything. With things working out, pure intention; I don't think I believe in it. Not in Los Angeles. Maybe nowhere."

"You think you know everything." Your hands enfolded beside his jacket, gripping beside it as your cheek rested beside the curve of his stomach.

"No. That's not it. I just don't want to drag you into things that are so obviously true."

Your expression raised up to ease up to his eyes, compact and reflective in their emotional narrative, and the vague layer of wet across them, and you could feel the way that the soft warmth of his fingertips were threading beside your hand even as he spoke his rejection, physical tenderness on the bottom of his eyes even as it mixed in with the baggy underlayer of his exhaust.

Your fingertips eased to the bottom of his palm as you felt his continued gentle teasing on your hand, his skin slick with his sweat of his nervousness as you brought your fingertips around to the side of his chubby wrists. He could feel his blood rushing with the connection, an intake of a sharp breath as he felt the way that your hands were tracing in the details of the side of his hands, and he didn't even try to fight the sensation of your hands slipping in and out of the spaces of his fingertips. All the physical sensation pushed something out of him as he felt the way that your eyes were looking up into his own while your cheek rested beside his chest, and you could feel the way that your eyes were melting underneath his confliction that was emulating inside of his being, the ancient pull that came from constant loneliness and even abuse of the world, and his inability to deny the sensation of what you were giving him.

"All you know is your own experience. And I'm a different experience. I can't promise you that I'll be exactly different from what you experienced before. And I am terrified-of course I am."

"I thought you said that nothing would terrify you after everything that you went through. What you still are." His eyes eased up to yours with tender resolve of a question; the sensation you gave him from the tenderness of your expression was awakening something in him, and made what was the usual to him of the world show itself in all of its detrimental flaws and inhumanity that had seemed tolerable before now as black and blunt in its clear void of its failure and of how intolerable it was in comparison.

"Being in constant states of having nothing to lose is like a constant weight of trying to fondle it to make it bearable for while you're on the thread of existence; like a sickness that I can turn into hope at times if I manipulate it well enough. And sometimes, I do, and that's when I ask myself what joy comes from. But when I say I'm terrified, I am acknowledging the extension of the emotional passage of what is being opened up-and I can't deny that I want it more than anything, even as I'm unknowing of it."

"So am I. And you know why? Because the likeness of you seeing all my flaws and not cracking under them is impossible. Anyone in general is kidding themselves if they think there's such thing as a human being strong enough or patient enough, enduring to carry the flaws and messy black of someone else. No one ever does, not really. And I can tell you that with confidence even with the punishment that comes along with the negativity because I know it's true. I've seen it more times than I know how to express. It's the way it is. The best way to cope is to accept isolation, do what you can in small ways for others, and be done with it."

Your eyes eased up to his, fragile and compact in your question. "I feel the same way as you. All the empty men I've ever had to endure, that disgusting look in their eyes while they took advantage, all of the terrible and inhuman ways people talk to me, the constant destruction."

"Exactly. So you get what I mean. It's too tiring to try and ascribe hope to something where there's too much negativity, despair, judgment. It's all there is, and the pain will never stop because of it. It can never be 'solved'. And I'm sorry. But I can't do this for you."

Your cheek raised up a few inches from Bojack's chest, emotion breaking in your eyes. "What do you mean?"

"I'm done with you. I'm telling you now. And that's not something I gave a lot of other people in the past. Much of anyone, really. The fact that I'm even giving you the clear communication is my end of my agreement that this was something. At least it gives you one chance to get up and turn away on your own if you need to."

Though Bojack's empty and dry eyes had been entirely focused on you and his rejection, he saw a flash of a shadow outside of the corner of his vision; his ears flicked up, eyes turning over into alert as he saw a cast of a black shadow where the projected galactic light had been a moment before. There seemed to be a haunted and stretched shadow, and as Bojack gave an abrupt rasp of a breath while he saw the body twisting through the projected shadow of light, he felt his eyes hallow in front of him as ears perked. It was a haunted feel of what seemed like a stretched shadow of a elk woman, her dress turned beside her torso, dress bellowing from her upper half and down to her legs, and she was being glided by another elk man beside her as his arms wrapped beside her body; they seemed to be indulging into a romantic dance, her hand glided beside her wasit as her body was twisted backward as her head eased to the backside, and Bojack snapped his head over to the edge of the hallway to see the bodies that would have been projected beside the wall; he got himself up a few inches, breathing with a frantic small pant while he kept the panic suffocated, body raised up as he snapped his eyes to the hallway; but there was nothing except for the sound of the swan beginning to end the rest of her day, and the sounds of the office clangs of her doing through the various material, the orange light tha came from the front of the entrance of the building while the stagance of the orange light outside that traced the side of the road eased in through the front of the hallway.

The shadows continued, though he noticed they started to become increasing more wretched and torn in the rhythm that made up their inner focus that would resolve to give the both of them peace within themselves outside of the natural torment of being human that would cause them to want or be aware of the smallness of it; and there was no mind between them, fully in rhythm and they lost one another in what seemed like the same rhythm of promise Bojack had within you. As his winced and frantic, puffed eyes turned over to them while he watched the form of the two previously content couple began to become more torn the more that their bodies were stretched while their focus was torn from the corruption of humanity of narcissism other than based needs, Bojack felt his association with anything that was too painful for him to think about in regards to that hallway seemed to be becoming moe vivid around him.

"I know this is more than likely a drug addiction or a hallucination-" Bojack's eyes snapped over with a wet ase through the front of the wall beside him, the elk woman's snout being torn and asundered from the side while her torso and clothes seemed ripped from the focus previously; the same happening to the man. "But do you see that, right there?"

Your head turned to the side of the wall, body raising up from where you had been pressed beside his chest; though your fingertips didn't leave being threaded beside the spaces of his hands. Your focus turned over to the wall beside you as you followed where Bojack's wincing and wet eyes, compact with emotion was focusing up on the wall. His eyes only took a break from focusing on the wall to dart down to yours in question, and a slight recognition overcame your features as you followed suite from how Bojack raised you upward.

"The world responds to people as they are-some would say deserve. For myself, I was unremarkable and quiet and liked activities to keep to myself or personal life, if there was anyone worth for personal life, and as a result I was hidden and unseen-less than nothing. But I never knew how else to be." Your fingertips squeezed beside the spaces of Bojack's hand as he gave another uneven breath, his eyes turning to your as he felt your fingertips squeeze beside his. "I've had to do the impossible of making peace with being nothing."

"What-are you talking about?"

"It wouldn't surprise me if anything rich or spiritual found its way to you. And if you were so deeply embedded and associated with me; of course it would attract the stories untold and unseen."

Bojack eased his body back as he looked you over in question.

"Is that what you see?" His mane was splayed out as his body swayed lightly; the room was now beginning to spin, and the sense of a centered identity you had given Bojack was now beginning to chip away into his foggy disassociation. "You see them?"

"Something tells me we're the only ones here that do."

He could feel the way that it that unforgiving and hunting sense of the hallway as continuously holding him hostage and was dressing up his every sensation around him, the walls themselves seeming as if they were a cage of the cheap future he was spinning in front of himself. He tried to fight it; he knew that either way, the familiar sense of himself and his sight would offer him absolutely no sense of relief in comparison to the strange sense of what seemed like an unseen universal grief around him. He could feel his own heart quickening in its intensity, and the dry lungs that seemed as if they were choking in emotion; the very emotional parts of him he never wanted to come to terms to meet with today in the first place.

His eyes winced as he gave another shaken breath, ears lowered as he watched the shadows and silhouette continue to thread beside one another; if Bojack hadn't been able to feel the energy that was executing through both of them that was so undeniably human, he would have thought they were projected lights; but he knew that complex feeling of humanity everywhere. The elk wife turned her head back, though this time her head seemed as if it was expanding into a black blot of light beside her, and turned into a black nothing; the black hole increased as it began to thread and ease beside the wall as it began to turn even further across the wall, and Bojack gave an abrupt jolt as he felt his arm press further on yours, the black from the elk husband and the hollow of his head beginning to blot out into an increased extent of black as the two began to become unrecognizable as human; the depth of the sudden black of the details of flawed humanity began to turn even further black until the hollowed ease began to thread and implore even further around the walls until they crossed and took over where there had been the columns before, the bodies beginning to melt away into something of an incomprehensible shape as they began to lose all of their coherent understanding of humanity, turning and melting over to the crowd as the black overcame the bottom floor-the black hollow of the heads increased with the expanse of their headspaces until there was nothing but a spinning black that surrounded the walls while it swept through where there had complex column and the details of mundanity of classical stagnce before.

Bojack gave an abrupt and frantic breath, his pupils dilated as he rushed himself upward from where he had kept himself huddled beside you a moment before. Your body eased back as your expression began to follow him as you felt Bojack abruptly thrusting his way upward, eyes dilated as he snapped his body up, hand cramped beside his chest as he stepped his way back abruptly. As he was giving his abrupt twisted dry breath he felt the black that had overcome his previously to begin to fall away from where the edge of black had been surrounding him entirely on the edge of his vision a moment before; the suffocating walls surrounding his vision began to abruptly spew back, and when he snapped his dilated and panicked eyes back to the wall where the elks had been bursting forth from their lack of humanity, there was nothing but empty wall now.

"Jesus." His hand came to rest beside his snout, furrowed and eyes winced as his ears slammed back, teeth grimacing as he stepped his way backward. You got yourself up, wrapping your arms around your chest as your rags eased beside your body as you looked up at him with a red edged inquiry against delicate and questioning eyes.

"Let's take you back home." You gave him a curt nod, stepping forward, but his eyes kept dilated as his feet stepped back, breathing coming out in frantic breaths. His eyes were dialted as he snapped his hands in front of him, frantic breaths easing out of him as he gazed at you with a verge of his own panicked insistence.

"No." His voice hitched into a breath, eyes winced and dimmed as his voice sounded even more clumsy with a desperate resolve now as it treamored. "You don't know me. And I told myself-" He gave a quick intake of a breath, eyes darting down in his frantic dilated exhaust- "I told myself that you know me because I want to believe it."

"I don't know how much longer I can stand the life that I have." Your eyes lost their life as you looked him over, and he couldn't take the earnest sickness in your eyes that he felt so akin to his; his dilated eyes snapped down as he gave another frantic uneven breath, hand coming to rest beside his snout. "I'm not asking you to be the extension of anything of other than where I am. Bojack-please. We need one another. If I lose whatever we've given one another, I can tell my heart will give out at this point in my life. And I know that it will for you, too. And I wish it wasn't that way-but we need to be as fragile and ease ourself into one another as best we can."

Bojack's eyes weren't even focused on you; his eyes were dilated in troubled thought, eyes winced in front of him as his hand kept rested on his snout.

"And the only reason why I can tell you all this now, is, ironically, because of the things about me that you don't know. I would suggest taking the bone and running with it."

"Can we at least have this one night?"

"No." His eyes snapped up to you, muscles on his face furrowed. "I am sick. And I don't know how I could make it more obvious that there's no other side to that and even if there was-there would be nothing to show for it afterwards." His eyes winced down to the front of his pocket as he gave a frantic breath, patting his hands beside his pocket until he gripped his hands out of the keys. His eyes winced as he darted his expression up to you, fingertips trembling beside the metal keys as he did so, teeth poked as he gazed at you with the emotional compact of his eyes. "I'll take you to a shelter. Or better yet-" He raised his hand up in thought as he dangled the keys in his hand. "I'll take you to Todd's house. He's a lot less heavy than me, he'll be able to get you out of this hole I put you in, because of course I did. I promise, I'll figure this out for you."

"I know that it feels like it's impossible to get yourself out once you've come to realize how deeply lost you are in your emotional suffering-a very real and tangible thing. I love you."

"No." His ears flew down further, eyes wincing inside his emotion as he gaze you a tension of both flair of sadness and a fight. "Why?"

"I don't care what you say in your own sickly perception. I love you, and I don't care how much you try to fight it or how much you try to turn away from it. Take me home; and we can talk in the morning."

Your body was tense in defense of decision as you walked to him, the same way that he had held you all those nights where, for those first couple of nights in a row where there was awkward tension but the want to get to know on another in kind, to have tha intimate extension of bonding Bojack had gone his entire life without, small laughs under the gray sheets and his arms wrapped beside your hips as you curled around his palms, your slender fingertips slicked beside the age of his cheeks, and he could feel the bad being chipped away from his skin while your fingertips threaded beside his skin; he had never believed it could be so easy to have something good come and take what had felt so prominent and permanent. His arms were wrapped around the side of your body in the middle of the night as you had scratched your fingertips around the front of his stomach, plump with an edge of a happy trail down from the curve of his stomach, fingertips shaking beside the ease of his coarse hair as the black of it threaded beside his stomach, and he had felt what seemed like a natural precious cradling beside your hand and his skin that seemed like a literal reintroduction to human life. Life would be as it was; but for him specifically he had found something that was something he had never known he would get; the resounding sense of purity.

You had that same firm decision now; to love on him and to take the extension of his hope, lips pressed around the side of the skin in a way that was of impossible gentleness and of favor as you eased your way towards all the curves of his body with both slender hands and ease of touch and lip; the lights and the city of Los Angeles easing out from the window, and the world had never felt so small and finite in its noise of disparagement and superficiality as much as it had been that night.

Those nights have been full of a gentle sort of honeyed relief that he hadn't been able to turn away from-almost too human that after years of denying himself it, he knew his heart would give out from feeling it too deeply that night, and though he couldn't had denied the connection, he did he feel as if he had had to close off from feeling it in its full entirety. He had had resistance that night, the same way he had had with you tonight, but he hadn't been able to turn himself away from the resistance than simply letting himself be locked.

He tried to open his mouth to say something, but his teeth poked as he felt nothing but a whimper come out, and he continued to breath frantically as he threaded his hands and tremble them beside the keys as he tried to find his own argument, but the memories kept coming back, sweet as they were feeling of your lips against the side of his own warmth skin, the raise of your smile beside his shoulders as your hands had unravel him within the watered light of the city as it had reflected into the room, your hands caressing on all of the insecurity that had been an extension of every reason why he had been clouded with the narrative that he would have never been loved, and with every distraction of any core of his truth taken from people who hardly seemed human themselves who had sued every bit of their energy to use him as a plank for their own aimless maliciousness of throwing on the constant narrative he was unimpressive and even less worth paying attention to; and the damage and ford him into only a consciously ease of extensive black until there had been nothing left, just as the door was only half open now, if even that.

He couldn't deny that sense of something that had seemed too human and precious that made his emptiness tragedy, rather than just emptiness without reason, as it seemed to be so much of the time, the way your hands wanted to press around the side of his own body; and the most undeniable sensation and the most profound of an entire life of a story that held an indescribable spirit of someone who truly loved in contrast to most-Bojack himself of only living in action, but never in spirit, and the story of a life that was cheap and forgettable, even to the one that bore it.

It had only been in the intimate night of the very bedroom where his detriment of his own action throughout the years of his life and the sin and countless blurry empty days had come over him that some of the most precious night light of the city began to seem precious, rather than something that only happened, and he allowed himself to feel how many of the times in those days of the same empty, hollowing bedroom he had felt himself as; and the impossibility of how rich it felt now just from one simple difference of a presence, all it took, and not unlike what you were doing to him now.

His ears lowered backward as his eyes closed, and he could hear how you stepped forward and over the floor, the muscles in his face trembling as he felt your body walking to him.

He had allowed himself to believe that that night. He wasn't sure if he was so ready on nights like tonight.

" One day." He felt the messy solution to what he wanted to do tonight mixed in with how he could appease your request. His eyes were empty and dry as he turned his empty dilated pupils up to your own. "I can stay here for tonight. I can stay here, and you can make up your mind in the morning. In our bed, obviously."

Your eyes flashed, and even as Bojack tried to dress up his suggestion as something that was civil and that you would both benefit from, he knew that he was revealing himself even as he didn't want to in his messy and erratic decision.

"Here are the keys." Bojack's ears lowered further as his eyes winced while he met your compact emotional expression. "You'll be ok. Can you get a ride?"

"You have a choice in this, too."

"No. That's not-" His eyes turned down to the keys in his fingertips, eyes lowering in his vulnerable exhaust as he felt the metal keys clang beside his fingertips, ears lowered. "Please don't ask any questions, ok? Just go home. You can sit down, lie in bed-you can eat whatever you want. The place is yours for the night, above all else."

Your body paused as you looked him over, disposition paused as you body stood and swayed in front of the continued blue galactic lights that surrounded your form, and he hated how delicate and naturally inquiring and insightful look in your disposition was.

You stepped your way forward, flashing your body over to him as your eyes fluttered down, and walked fast paced to him.

"No. Honey, I mean it, stop-"

You walked forward with an increased pace until your arms found the plush curve of his hips, and his eyes eased into his fragile emotion as he lifted up his arms as he gave an abrupt and fragile noise, clumsy and low toned and increasing the feeling of your arms across his hips as you pulled yourself around him.

He felt a frustration and tension ease through his body, and for a moment did his arms keep raised up as he tensed under the feeling of your body curling around him, pale cheek of your face rested beside his stomach. But he closed his eyes as he felt the way his body was naturally beginning to lower in its tension until it rested further against you, plush curve of his stomach easing beside your embrace until his arms came to rest around your hips entirely, palm coming to caress beside your back. His arms began to lower until he found his embrace resting beside your arms, teeth poked and breath coming out in his unease of his uncertainty as he reached out a hand and caressed it beside your back, and he was reminded of that eternal feeling of the way it felt in the middle of the night of holding you and of having that clear headedness of intimacy between both of your bodies and emotion in the middle of the intertwined night; the only thing that made sense of gave him a soothing nature of humanity where everything else just lead to foggy headedness or discontentment.

"Look, I'm giving you the best I can given the time in my life you met me, ok?" His voice was trailing and somber as he eased his hands beside your back, ears lowering as his eyes turned into a dim exhaust of emptiness as he turned his head to the side and kept his cheek by yours. "I know it's not what you want. I know it's not what you deserve." His ears lowered further as he kept his hands beside the middle part of your back, remembering the night the blue light of the city had eased through the large window while he had felt that surrerality coming over him of something indescribable for the brief moment that kind of human beauty had existed. "I'm sorry."

"It doesn't feel like it." Bojack felt himself give a vague wince and a jab into his attempt at strong and confident intention at your words. Your words were insisted even further with your body easing beside his while your fragile arms, dotted in soot and cuts and bruises still even after two weeks, eased against his embrace as your body curled beside his stomach. "I hope you know that's not an attack."

"Just an observation, I know. And a very good one."

He could feel as if he was being led into you almost as if he was hypnotized, and even as he felt that solidification of his intention regardless, he felt something flip inside of him with chaos at the idea of you being able to see him well enough for him to hurt you. It was the first time he had ever felt the sensation, and it was one of countless that came along with the gradual reveal of the new realities he was uncovering from the time he had ben with you."

"I'm not giving you the worst part of me I could. If I did, I wouldn't be allowing myself to do this right now. Not even having you touch me. But I'm definitely not going to say no. Not if you love me. The same way that I can't say no to get into some sort of impulsive hook up, I can't say no to drugs. I can't say no to any of it-so this muggy and fogged sense of being caught up in this constant chaos of good or bad is all I can give you." His ears lowered as he looked at you with increasingly lowered eyes executed by his self-loathing as your turned your head up from where you had been resting your chin beside his chest. "Not exactly the most romantic night of your life. Almost makes you realize that you're going to bed with an addict. And I don't think you realize how much I'm trying to help you by telling you what that means."

"If you were like all those other men who keep comparing themselves to all the ways you could be the worst thing to happen to a woman being taking in from relentless and stagnant despair otherwise-" You ran your hands around his shoulder, Bojack wincing as he turned his eyes down with a wince, ears lowered. Y"ou wouldn't have ever had this conversation in the first place. I speak the language of the kind of person you think you are. And you're not even remotely speaking the same one as the ones I've met."

"Things aren't as necessarily black or white as you think." Bojack's eyes darted away as his hands reached away from where he was cradling you as his body reteched back, though he didn't take his torso away from being in the embrace of your arms. You kept your eyes eased onto his as your head titled up to his in that patient inquiry. "I'm having it with you now because I didn't have it with all those other people that I hurt. Which, by the way, I'm a million times worse off than they are for. But nobody wants to believe it when I tell them that; and they would be right when they said I deserve it because I couldn't look into myself and accept the fact that for some people, there is no virtue or higher quality. People are just born as this sick, tired thing, and that's all there is-and there's no going back on it. In the past, I just wanted to believe that I could be the one that felt good about themselves all the time because I always felt like I was the one in control for not warning them even though I knew what would happen down the line, even if I knew that everything would implode in on itself eventually for my own issues; but ultimately, it felt good to me, because at the end of the day I had the rare sense of control, and fo the woman hurt for it-" His ears lowered in exhaust, eyes turned down in thought, and there was a soft pathetic wince in his eyes that came along with guilt, emotion lacing within them. "It's the opposite because of what feel with you, and its making me think back on all the other times when love was just a sense of control of something in my life."

"You've had a lot of time to think, to be telling me all of this."

"I have, actually." Bojack's expression furrowed over to yours as his hands began to lace outside of your palm, ears lowered but with an earnest look of insistence in his expression. "I'm the victim because of myself-and other people are the victim because I needed to have one thing in my life that made me feel worthwhile, or like I had a say in something. I can keep trying to grip into these small trails of relief like drugs and goddamn hallucinations and thinking I can handle this with small little pretend lullaby stories to tell myself at night, but-" His fingertips eased outside of your fingertips as his hands detached from yours, eyes glimmered and ears lowered as he began to hutch his way back and away from your touch. You stepped back as you allowed it to happen, though the intensity in your eyes didn't lessen.

"Bojack, every moment of your life, you're always in control of your own body, thoughts. No matter how terrible we feel or what happens, we're not dead until we're dead; and believe me, our thoughts aren't as tangible as much as we tell ourselves."

His hands raised up in front of him, ears flown down. "And it's not going to go away just because I decided to try to give yourself one little conversation or maybe you had a choice. And frankly, with the way that it feels, I don't exactly plan on making a habit out of it. I just wanted you to know." His eyes eased down in thought. "After everything you've been though, you deserve to at least have that."

"But you aren't even trying."

Bojack's eyes winced as his anger snapped in front of his eyes. "Who says anything about the idea that I didn't try as best as I could?"

"Whoever you are right now, whoever I've known, it's not the person you keep talking about in detail."

"Yeah. Because-"

"-And even if it was, it wouldn't matter, because my perception of that person would be someone entirely different in how you feel to me in contrast to how that person makes you feel. Can you just let me see things from my end and act with it in the way that feels true to me?"

"No." Another uncertain breath escaping outside of his lips as his eyes darted down in thought. "I don't think-"

"Some of the most human moments of my life were when things were unexpected and when I just did it-even if I knew I would die. Especially then. Life isn't worth anything if you take it so preciously that you're not even living to our full potential to begin with."

"Yeah, and I get that. But this is different."

"I've seen that look in your eyes, the fog in front of your eyes for the last couple of nights, and I know it. I feel it because I feel that inherent sense of this almost heavenly promise of release that that breathtaking relief that comes along with intimacy, and I want to feel as enamored in it together as much as we can."

"That-fog, is for a lot of reasons." Another few threads of his awkward breaths, eyes wincing as he looked you over, emotion wet in his eyes. "And not all of them are for what you think. I see this world and its people and how terrible it is, and how much it always has been, and there's no escaping the way that things are unless you're a part of it, and that's what I had to do to survive myself for so long. That fog you're describing-its from a long few years of complete black and suffering, and you need to know that."

"Can we see the way that it goes if you stick around?"

"I'm not leaving you. Yet. I don't know. I want you to go home first, rest for a few days."

Though your eyes didn't lose their red edge of insistence, your palms curled beside your hand, and you seemed to become more somber within yourself as you gave him a small, curt nod.

"I know." You kept standing there for a moment, and the meaning of the emotional compact nature, a small thread and guide of hope in the middle of what made up a detrimental amount of increasing intense suffering that had previously been nothing but black walls on either end of Bojack that had caused him to want to drive off of the bridge the day he had met your, seemed to increased in that impossible small but gradually building hope; cheap and burning out as soon as no longer focused on, and yet enough to make the rest of the grit of black of life feel almost bearable. "You don't have to see yourself the way that I see you, you don't have to believe that it exists, either. Just let me, at the very least, try to feel it myself. Let me try to take care of you"

"I was going to jump when I met you. I was going to go on a roadtrip to the same building where Secretariat was while he was standing on the edge of the bridge, and I was going to jump. It was the only thing that made sense of felt good anymore-it didn't even feel like a choice. The trip would have been a couple of a days drive, but I was ok with that. If anything, I preferred the drama; I could say goodbye to the world, myself, think about if I really wanted to do it. And I knew I would come to that conclusion. That was what I wanted-was to be free from-everything. It would be a meaningful death, it would be something that felt it mattered to me-and I know it wouldn't exist outside of my own action, the meaning, but I would take what I would get-and even that had this small, cheap gratitude to it. It felt good, compared to what I had gotten. Suicide felt unatural, and terrfying-but it felt like it was that one thing that pressed that little trigger in my brain where you just know that something feels right. I went to the gas station before I left to get me some drinks and food on the road so that by the time I got there, I would feel as if I lived for the last time, on my own terms. And the reality is that that was the best I could hope for. And that is still true, if I know the right thing of what to do." He gestured his hand in front of you, expression authentic with his insistence. "That is the kind of poison you're getting caught into."

Your lips pressed together in tension, eyes eased and glimmering through the stars that were lazing around the front of your eyes.

"But you stopped-and you didn't do any of that."

"I still might." His voice was somber and vaguely cracked with emotion as his eyes lowered down. "I don't know. I never know. I've reached this new sense of-end, recently. For every end that I have, there's always this feeling every time that the despair is undeniable, that it's the worst it's ever been or ever will be, that there won't be any way out this time. And even if something changes or if nothing terrible happens, I still feel that way. And especially this time."

"But you've allowed me to actually give that to you-these past two weeks. Despite everything. I'm tired of being punished by this world just for not being molded a certain way-just for being alive."

"I know. But you have to know that I've only allowed this to happen because I am a selfish asshole. A coward. I can't say no. I thought over the bridge idea for years before I actually started to go through with it. I'll take and take until there's nothing left if you'll let me."

"You don't have to worry about that, then. The same way you don't have to worry about dropping me off somewhere with no home. There's nothing to take from my end."

Bojack somberly looked into your eyes, light flashing amber back and forth between yours as your expression threaded against his in the light.

"Yeah." His voice was somber, dry, as he spoke the soft acknowledgement of your words. "I guess that would be the best match that would make sense either of us could hope for."

You have Bojack a soft smile, as if complimenting even the most dry agreement towards bonding.

"My entire life, I've been in despair and stagnance over frustration as to the way the world was; and I knew that no one would ever think differently from the way things had always been, that things never would. You were the breakage away from that, Bojack. And you need to listen to me and recognize how big of a deal that is for me. The effect we can have if we keep going."

His breath shuddered as his eyes darted down, and his expression squinted down as he looked at his sweater where the swan had eased her breasts beside his only a little while ago. His eyes winced as he felt that blac despair come over him again, body curled inside of himself as he did so as his fingertips threaded beside his palms.

"Right," he said after a moment. "The problem is that the small little good things aren't as log lasting or lead to the trail of what you think. I know you think it does. I did it with relationships for a long time."

Even with that heaviness that he carried around with him, especially in regard to the mentioning of his suicide that was still such an instrinct part of his worth and sense of relief, and the sickness of knowing how easy he could do it again, as he was around you and sharing your thoughts, he felt a certain kind of indescribable compelling want of that incessantly human nature again, and that bitterness of hi depression seemed as if it was either on the same level or was being overcame with being love with you, your air and disposition falling into an extension of an air that he wanted to be compelled to further; he knew he wasn't going to deny himself the muddled and familiar plan, but he couldn't deny the foreign feeling that surrounded him that seemed like a new kind of nuance of illness, but was more reliviing, rather than taking.

"For people like me, Bojack, I don't really ever connect with people as much as I always just had this sickly, suffocated disassociation from everyone around me, and expression was always robotion and a transaction at best, and communication or of having anything in common was nonexistent."

"I know what you mean."

"You say that foe certain people, there's nothing but stagance and bad that no one wants to pay attention to. I am telling you that there is nothing that can be taken from me; if anyone was ever someone who could match your sense of guilt, it would be me. My humanity, if it would ever be considered that at this point in my life, is a deep and empty bottom of eccentric sickness that cames along with long term profound suffering-and I know I'm not alone or special in that experience, but the way life had grated me and molded me over time feels as if it's only relevant to be specifically. And no matter how much I wake up and try to find it, there's nothing on the outside every day no matter how much I look inside, there's nothing that needs me except for more empty of a void turning in and out of itself while I torment myself within a complex headspace of an indifferent existence."

" I still feel that way." His hands rested beside his wrists, fingertips easing against his skin as his concerned expression turned up to you in his resolve. "I get what you're saying, and I agree with you. But after the long emptiness of time I had to reflect, I realized a lot of things about myself, the indifference of reality, the complexity of an average life and the suffering of it that's never seen-and I don't want to make you settle for that life. At the very least, I can make sure I don't do that to you."

He paused as he gave an abrupt breath, eyes turned down as his expression eased to the ground. His eyes winced as he gazed as he looked up at you, and with a vague hitch of a breath did he step forward for once; though you became tense, his expression spoke of one where now the both of you were, for at least the time being, letting go of all shame and instead falling into to fully feel the resolve of your default emotions without guilt of invalidation or shame from others. His stocky arms were as inviting as they ever were as he pressed his embrace around your body, and the fragility of your body curled into his embrace, his snout rested onto the top of your shoulder, breath coming out in a paced ease as he rested the top of his snout on your shoulder, and after a moment of his vague hesitation did he press his lips on your shoulder.

He was memorizing the way the the fragility of your fingertips were threading beside the black of his mane, the delicley that came along with the tender ease of the way you touched him with an odd inherent sense of grief. "I can't see the good or value in this. And I don't think there's ever going to be one day that I do."

There was a long silence, and though Bojack wanted to to ease out in its meaning threading itself along with its sickness, he could sense the sound of high heels that were echoing down the hallway; the sounds of the few voices left muttering to one another as the doors began to lock and close, and he knew he only had so much time left.

"Bottom line is that I wish I could give you the answer you wanted- that maybe this will make sense or won't lead to sickness or suffering in some way that I know like the back of my hand, or that I'm going to feel this other way eventually to make you know that this won't last forever. But I'm telling you this because I can't promise you that, and I'm telling you to go home, enjoy it for what it is, and get some sleep. That's all I can tell you right now."

"I know.". Your voice was a reflective soft whisper, and you pressed your fingers further against his mane.

"Do you?" He lifted himself away from your torso as he looked over at you with a tentative brow and question passed across his features, and there was a genuine challenge there that spoke of the edge of his concern; almost a certain kind of violence that was within him if not followed.

"I get it." Your fingertips began to trail into the keys that were dangling forgotten between his hands, and he gave a soft breath as he closed his eyes and felt a slight tension go through him at your permission of your understanding. "I'll get some sleep. I would say that humanity has a way of working itself out if just by the natural reactions that occur from the lack of justice in a scenario, but-maybe there is no justice in this, and its just is as it is."

"Good." The heaviness began to dissipate even with just that one word, and his hands began to trail outside of your hands as he stepped back now further; already a casualty of conclusion began to ease between the two of you. He gave you a small attempt at a small while it met into the gentle ease of his eyes as he spoke; "I'm glad you're at least the type of company that takes even extremely complicated manners and lets them go after some talk about it. Takes what you need to fo when I get sick of having to deal with other people's company."

"You've made what you want very clear." You stepped back now, the keys easing between your fingertips.

"It's not like that. I-" A soft breath of frustration. "I know how much I love somebody, even if it's in a way that dosen't make sense to anyone else. But I've always loved my time alone, and no matter how much it hurts, it's the only thing that makes sense to me. And I don't ever wish that on anyone who is around who I actually want to protect."

"And I'm one of those people?"

"You are." His hands came to cramp beside his palm, and he pulled his arm to his body as he gave you a soft pout. "You're something that feels like it's in control in a way that makes sense. I won't deny that. Something happens to you once you've experienced certain kinds of people. You start to see people as moreso lessons or things you have to put up with than anybody that's actually worth being around-people whi ruin your survival rather than help it, even though you'd think we'd all want the same thing at the end of the day. But I don't feel that with you-and whatever else it is I do tonight, please take that much."

"I'm not scared of the way that you talk as much as you think that I am. Because I agree with you, and I'm in my own corners too, Bojack. Everything that you're so scared of, everything that you think I'm disgusted by, everything that you think that I would never not run away from. There's certain dark roads for the isolated person that can lead to the richest form of hope when met with another who has walked their own version of a dark path. "

Bojack's worried eyes trailed across yours, expression pouted in its breaking authentic emotion that only came with a long broken and unseen life.

"Are you going to have somewhere to go, then? When you get out onto the street. You'll be able to find my car, call one of the drivers on my phone to come back you up and take you home?"

You raised up your lips into that broken attempt of reassurance as much as you were able, reaching your eyes that Bojack knew had the compelling wound of something you needed that the world simply didn't or couldn't offer.

"I'll find my way. I always have."

"Right." His top hand squeezed underneath his lower one. "Right. Of course."

You stepped your way forward, and though Bojack wanted to protest about the backwards of the process, he allowed you to walk forward, until your hands came to rest beside the back of his neck again, your cheek still rested and sculpted against his chest as you did so while he felt you give a genuine ease of a heavy breath that he reflected with his own. Your fingertips threaded through and down his mane until it began to reach and touch the brawny touch of his skin while your fingertips met it, feeling the burning from the film of his skin as it met beside your peace.

"I'll be at home, and waiting. The first time that anywhere has ever felt like it's earned the idea of home."

He smirked as he allowed himself to feel at least somewhat of his former ghostly confidence that he had used to carry with him when his career was at its climax eased across his expression; back when he had still carried his cockiness with a certain humble and natural human apology, for better or worse. He knew now that you would have seen admiration in even that, though for the past year in the emptiness he had given himself as a form of punishment and to see that full reflection within himself of what had gone wrong to keep that demanded and consistent demanding feeling of black no matter what he did and to feel it and to recognize it in its full extent and to see the endurance and permeant mark within him, he found he was too tired and weary with the truth to find much joy or even relief in the fact now.

"So telling you how pointless it is to beat this dead horse isn't going to chase you away, is it?"

Your hands threaded into the upper part of the top of his back as your palm rested beside the top of his shoulders, feeling the radiation that came from the lovability of his erratic emotion underneath his suit.

"I'll be home, and in bed."

You spoke it as a vague sort of whisper, and it was enough to make him feel that far more compelling whisper and hint of that of which wasn't said, and within your voice did there seem to be a confidence that he would stick around-and he found that he couldn't find any truth within himself to deny that.

It only made him feel a father black in his chest, knowing how sick he had been as of late and of what he was going to do, t and he felt the way that you could sense his emotion that was painted in his physical skin.

"That much I can absolutely promise you."

"I know you will."

He loaded a soft and gentle rasp of his own uncertain breath as a last statement to what you spoke; one that was lost of his own desire to be able to believe of what you saw and wanted to believe. But he felt as if he were too far gone now; there was something devastating about realizing he had become so sick and black and was weakening because of it that to improve now was no longer an option.

Bojack wanted to stay within the warmth of your intimacy, and as he felt both the memories of the past week that expanded out into a multitude of a far longer life, as something did whenever something oog genuine meaning and intensity was presented in experience, though in the past Bojack had only known the negative side of it, he found that it was becoming more painful to allow himself to follow his familiar corrupted path.

Harder; but not impossible. Nothing was easier than familiarity.

He began to inch himself away from you entirely, but he allowed himself to pause easing away from your breast, keeping his arms wrapped around you for a few moments longer, even as he could feel that stretch of punishment that was guiding ahead of him into that tormented expanse stretch of inner torment, conflict and conflict that came along with his decision. His eyes into an expanse of guilt as teeth poked while he began to release his arms away from your hips, and your red eyes turned up to meet his, and a soft supple curve of your lip was the only thing that suggested to Bojack that you were, to some extent, at least in some familiar of agreement with the decision the both of you were making.

"Go to sleep, inquiring little thing." His palms eased beside the side of your cheek, and your face rested beside his touch as his eyes implored and searched against yours, though it was clear just from the stoic look in his eyes that his mind was made up. "Since you know everything."

You nodded in a small fashion, though there was plenty of pain eased up into the tension of your expression; but that pained acceptance was eased onto your expression, and Bojack found that his relief at the permission to go forward with what he wanted to do felt better than the guilt.

"Ok."

He could feel the tension in his forehead raising and furrowing as you stepped forward, this time with the wordless acknowledgment that you would be leaving, and he allowed his face to feel decorated by your lip without resistance as he felt your lips press on the side of his snout lighty-then changed over to cradling and pressing intimacy against the side of his cheek, your other hand cradling the other side of his the curve of his aged cheek. He felt the way his blood raced through his veins while his body leaned forward as he allowed his fingertips to press beside the spaces of your fingertips, letting out a vague and shaky breath as he allied himself to be fully pulled in by your embrace. He closed his eyes as he allowed himself to fully enjoy the moment, resting his snout on your shoulder in a delicate fashion as he did so while ears lowered and his snout rested beside the curve of your face.

"You were the first person that made me feel like an individual. Rather than just a countless number, so much to the point that even I forget about myself under foggy detached dissociation. Thank you."

Bojack felt himself tense as he felt your breasts ease beside his body while you turned your torso forward, and he spoke a slight rasped word of protest feeling you ease beside him. The sound of the galactic stars in the sky to the meditative music that surrounded the both of you began to be switched off entirely from one layer to the other that created the illusion, and as he focused on the memorization of your breath and the feeling of your lips a few inches away from his cheek and the feeling of your hands threaded beside his, it took a certain indefinable amount of strength for him to pull himself away; and he knew the punishment was something he knew was waiting for him on the other side. One thing that he knew for sure, he certainly wasn't the one who would be feeling the benefitted for this long term.

"You'll fall asleep if you keep doing this. Come on."

His fingertips caressed beside the top of your knuckles as he gave you a tired but authentic pull of his lip, that was raised into a tired but reassuring soft smile.

Your head kept titled up to him feeling his fingertips threading beside your cheek as your eyes eased against his in inquiry."You're sure?"

"I'm already dozing off slightly, and that is the last thing we both need no matter what direction we need to take this tonight."

He chuckled lightly for the sake of trying to dissipate any tension, and with that did you began to walk backward until your body was standing beside the archway, the noise of the swan trailing out and over through the front of the office space while you stepped your way back and into the pillars beside your form, giving him a small raise of your lip that spoke softness of understanding.

"Don't forget the keys." His bottom eyes winced as his ears lowered while he watched you step your way to the hallway. His fingertips began to play beside his wrists as he watched you continue to step back, and with a small nod and with your fingertips easing beside the metal did you give him a small nod, though the compact worry in your expression didn't leave your eyes. "You'll be fine. Just make sure to call one of my emergency numbers and you might have to put up with some insufferable jokes and conversations, but if you just keep your head down, you'll make it through and back to my house. Promise."

Your fragile hands eased beside the keys as you eased them to your chest, gripping your hands against and though the metal.

"You don't have to worry about me going anywhere unusual or unreachable."

"Why?"

"I can't drive. And even if I could, I haven't gone anywhere other than on foot in years."

He opened his mouth to say something instinct-but he'd already planned out everything specifically to the way that he needed, and all he did was step back as he began to flick his eyes over to where he could see the front desk; or at least the vague hint of it from where the swan woman was sitting in front of it, still making the occasional mundane clatter of his movements. He could hear the heaviness of the patterns of your breath that was coming out from your lips as they parted; he wished he didn't, but he knew the way he was chipping down and destroying your sanity and whatever little well being you could hope to have left.

"I'll see you tonight, then." Your hands curled further beside the keys, and you began to step back and around the corner of the body of the statute that was twisted in front of the edge of the corner, your eyes not leaving his but the light step of you feet easing into agreement that Bojack was getting his way, and Bojack's ears only lowered lightly at that.

Your head turned away from Bojack now entirely as you finished stepping your way around the statue, then turned as your expression finally detached from him while the fragility of your body and air began to take to walking down the hallway. Bojack's eyes lowered as he kept his head toward the side; he didn't move for a long moment even as he was granted the ability to move and to function as he pleased now, to execute the plan that had felt so satisfying in the muddled headspace of his desperation. He stepped his feet back as he began to walk his way to the opposite side of the wall, hands still pressed against one another as he turned his wincing and puffy black bags up to the ceiling as he felt himself sending up an indefinable desperate prayer, then side stepped his way to the side and over to the hallway as he turned his head to the expanse of it to make sure that you were taking your leave out like you said.

You took to speaking a simple sentence to the swan woman who stood beside you behind her desk, your words soft and slow as your had turned while acknowledging her. Your hair, though still strangled and messy in its erratic messiness of what you seemed content to leave as it was, turned to the swan as he spoke a few soft words; though Bojack wanted to strain his senses to hear what you spoke, all he caught was the small words of your sentences that seemed as if they were more of a civil goodbye, rather than something to appease Bojack's abrasive paranoia. His ears lowered as he felt his eyes wincing in pain as he stepped his way to the side of the entrance, of the hallway of where the both of you had been, and the wet melancholy of his eyes watched as you talked to the swan; your profile and the tracing of your head seemed as if it was especially golden and fragile in its odd eternal nature as it traced with a golden thread of an ease of a light around your silhouette. The swan seemed as if she were being civil in kind, the long of her neck turned forward to you with her eyes lowered into that calm reassurance Bojack had come to know all too well himself from his bargaining with her; but your air and intention was far more calm, sweeter and gentler in contrast to the erratic panic of how Bojack carried himself and talked to her with his own ill and erratic intention.

Your head tilted to the side and over to where Bojack was just as he was about to subtly make his way down the hallway, but his eyes widened as he felt a jolt go through his body as your head turned, the golden light from the end of the day pouring around your silhouette and adding to the inquiry of warmth in your eyes that was already so prominent that Bojack couldn't imagine how he was going with the confidence of his own destruction.

But your head turned away from looking at Bojack without any reaction, and you laughed along with the swan over a small and mundane comment, and with that did you give her a small nod as your placed your hands beside the keys and began to walk down the hallway. The orange light from the outside of the open cracked door was left open by several of the other tipsy and callous people that hadn't bothered or cared about leaving it open, and the sunset light eased and enfolded around your dress and body as you walked your way out to the door, the fragility of your fingertips easing beside your palms as you eased your hands beside the door and opened it up a few inches further, and then with a small misstep of your concentration with a vague stumble did you walk your way out the door.

Bojack's eyelids lowered as he gave a heavy breath while he gave a vague sigh of relief, complimented by a sense of release from all of his previous confliction as he turned down to the pockets of his black tuxedo. The expression of his features furrowed into increased tension as he found a small paper stick that responded to his fingertips as he patted it beside his pockets, then took to digging his fingers into it a ss he placed his hands around the paper stick and pulled it out, eyes turning over the paper stick as he managed to balance it between the spaces of his fingertip as he looked it over. He gave a breath as he threaded it fully and confidently into the spaces of his fingertips, the tip of his thumb flicking against ti to serve as a reminder that there would be something to escape the pain he is resting upon himself in case it came to hit him in an even more direct fashion later, and, indirectly, with whatever way that it came to you later within whatever tormented and conflicted fashion it haunted him as when he got him; he never knew how his pain would execute itself, and by the time he got himself, he knew it more than likely that he would be far from the at least somewhat cautious person he was now.

"Hey, bird feathers. Thanks for making sure you could keep that cleaned up for me."

He kept his brow raised up teasingly as he made his way over to where the swan was standing up right in her focus in front of the computer. Her eyes trailed over to Bojack as she caught the slight sharp guide of his smirk, best as he was able, though he knew that the dryness in his eyes that came from authentic worry would give itself away at this point no matter what he did to try and make it as something insignificant.

Her eyes only flashed up to Bojack's for a small ease of a moment, and there was a vague judgment but ultimately kindred tease about the emotion in her eyes as she looked Bojack over. She was keeping her arms placing firmly on the desk beside her as she kept her hands snapped and tapped beside the keyboard, her eyes narrowing as she kept her focus on the keyboard.

"You cannot seriously still be pretending like there's anything left to do at this point after all that."

His elbow welcomed itself beside the side of the desk counter as he leaned his stout body beside the desk and looked her over in that attempt of being causal and pursuing in his old cocky charming way, much as he had never felt like it was what lead to his happiness. He knew he was good at it; even in the messiness of scenarios, he could always find a way to charm the woman around him. It was one of the few things that allowed him permission to continue to feel good enough about himself throughout the hours of his life to function, though he knew that his clumsier and more insecure self would be in toe from behind, unseen and pushed aside as much as possible for his own barely sense of coherent worth of a certain mold the world forced him to dress up and have.

"It's something to keep me busy, and I like busy. Nothing to go home to tonight, there's no rush. My existence is about filling myself up with as many compact tasks as much as I'm able until-" She gave a small shrug of her shoulders without turning her eyes away from the taping on her screen. "-Well, until it's my time to go."

"You don't get-bored?"

"What I worry about is making sure I can stay as content on a day to day basis with meaning and focus until I go. To keep myself from being choked from the inside out of what I'll feel otherwise if I don't. Anything else about what is going on, anything else of the worth of what I do or what that even means, is none of my concern. I don't need to make ti my concern. Anything that dosen't relate to me directly and my perception and trying to keep myself busy with as much noisy nonsense of anything is all that matters to me. That's where my sanity is. Anything else is something a fool does."

"Well-" Bojack's eyes turned down, and the true expanse of the emptiness within his eyes turned forward as he gave a slight gesture of his hand with a shrug. "You can certainly call me a fool, then. And at this point, I would be more than ok with that."

The swan's eyes paused with a vague interruption where she had been intently focused on her task beforehand. Her eyes flashed over to Bojack, and he kept his eyes dry and empty as he met he own; but with all the confidence and of the permission Bojack was giving her for her to continue with their previous agreement.

"You're sure you want to do this, then?" The fire of the orange light just before golden hour began to come to an end began to flash in front of her eyes, giving her an illuminated light as it sparked against a vague disbelief, and for once Bojack felt as if he was more devastated at seeing it rather than annoyed or frustrated, such as he had been with woman who poked and prodded at him for the things he did because of his erratic and indefinable misery in the past.

"Yeah." He rolled up his eyes as he gave a soft debt of an exhausted breath, turning his lowered eyes forward to the desk as he eased his body from leaning on the side of the counter as he turned to meet her. Her black eyes looked up at him with that inviting flirtatious invitation as she eased her head up to meet Bojack's. Even now, he knew that his own implosive and loathing narratives were coming to come imploding inside of him from the inside out as he felt the comparison of his body beside yours in contrast to the emptiness of what he was taking. Bojack was full and well in tuned with the natural and gradual progression of the constant different states of despair and loss, and it was only the functionality of his natural nature that kept him sane whenever his mind had spun out into something unfathomable that came along with misery.

"I'm not going back to my house. Not until she gets the idea and leaves on her own, which-considering the way she seems to have this natural respect for me, even though she shouldn't, shouldn't take more than about a couple of days or maybe even less. So-you know." The pathetic sadness in his eyes was as fully present as much as he couldn't be bothered to hide as his eyes lowered down and the expression of genuine regret eased across his features. "We can do this without any conflict or shame. It all is what it is. Everyone involved is aware."

The swan's eyes were gleaming further in her amused ease, and she shoved her hand away from the side of the keyboard, the rest of the cluttered material that had made up the minute gritty business to keep her away from whatever deeper and more corrupted part of her was surrounding her inside as she eased her white arms across the counte. Her torso began to lean further across it as that contenment leaned across her expression, and though Bojack enjoyed the natural sense of purpose and of promise towards what she was granting him with the way her narrow eyes looked him over, he curled his stout fingers into his palm, his eyes darted into an insecure thread as his teeth poked, ears lowered as he leaned his body back a few inches.

" Back so soon? How nice of you."

"More like how so romantically obligated of me. Not for you. It's for the woman that I cheated on tonight". He didn't bother to keep the annoyance out of his tone now. "Do you have a pen and a piece of parchment? Or anything actually useful? Or the only thing that you have going on around here that isn't a computer computer ran by a woman who doesn't keep her promises about drug smuggling, and is tapping on by fingers with a name behind it that can only promise things that's definitely never going to happen?"

Her expression furrowed into a grimace. Something somber entered her eyes as she flared her eyes across Bojack's, and the flirtation seemed to leave her eyes for a moment. Her toros began to lurch itself back as she looked over at him with a grimace, and a dead ease of a look in her eyes as she met Bojack'sl both a challenge and an odd dealt out hand of her own hurt under the illusion of cold separation that she was trying to maintain.

"All right." Her shoulders rolled as she readjusted while her narrow eyes gave Bojack a quick turn of her head, narrow eyes gleaming against his body as she gave him a contained heated flare. "Watch it. Just because it we had sex doesn't mean that I actually care about you in any capacity or that I won't do anything I can to get rid of you. I'm just here to do business and to do it in a civil manner. If we both got hot earlier to try and cope with whatever twisted reason either of us has for wanting to do those things, that that's something that can easily be looked over for both of our sakes. A transaction is a transaction."

"Yeah. No kidding." He shot his eyes over at her with a wrinkled and puffy glare as he tapped his fingertips beside the edge of the counter in front of him. His eyes darted up to her in that inquisitive fashion of a question, and it gave him the sharpest feeling, mixed in with an undeniable end of grumpiness, of just how quick she switched, and the remembrance he had that every relationship had felt just as quick and superficial to the point where he had alway struggled to ever seen the point in the first place. "Just hand me some parchment and let me do what I need to do. This isn't going to be easy-but the best part is that it has nothing to do with you this time, so you don't have to worry about being apart of it."

The swan raised an eyebrow as she looked him over with a challenge that was clearly meant to be patronizing, though she turned around from behind the desk as she began to reach for an office paper and pen. "Hard for you to admit that you cheated on somebody and hurt them beyond repair again?"

"More like hard for me to admit that I wasted my cheating on someone who has more feathers than talk or promises and acts like they're above people like me." Bojack gave her an intense glare as he reached out a hand and gripped it beside the parchment that the swan gave to him. She chuckled as she rolled the heat of her eyes up while Bojack's eyes flared over to the crumpled paper as he felt his palm shake taking his hand sinto the office paper. He took to groping his hands against the side of it even as it crumpled under his trembling touch as his eyes flashed up to the swan, stepping his way back a few paces to ensure he could get away from her and of everything the challenging edge of her air representing for him.

"So what's all this, then? You're going to try and write a letter and talk yourself out of a bad, possibly truamating, date for the poor woman outside?"

"I'm not truamazing her." Bojack's voice was edged with abrasive insult as he spoke, and both of his hands gripped further beside the pages-but the swan lifted her brows up in a quirked and mocking fashion as she tilted her eyes away from him in her disagreement. His eyes turned down as he felt his fingertips grip further beside the pages. "I mean-of course I didn't mean to, is all I'm trying to say. I wanted to give her the opposite tonight, not something that she would look back on and regret. I wanted t give her something tonight-" He cut himself off as his eyes were hollowed in front of him as the emotion stayed heavy and reflected in his expression. The swan's eyes turend back to Bojack as she caught the lowering of his expression, and she twisted her body body to his as her white hand thraded on the top of the counter; Bojack seemed as if he was only halfway snapped outide of his considerable hell as his ears perked.

"Bojack, what we did here is illegal today."

"I am aware." Dry sarcasm entered his eyes as he looked her over. "What is your point in bringing that up now?"

"If that woman has any chance of knowing what happened tonight, or end sup using it to her motivation, with with her situation I didn't think either of us needs to scratch our head about what that is or how that's going to look, then we're both going to be in life ending trouble. You understand me?"

"Nice job on trying to keep the place decorated, by the way." Bojack's heavy and lowered, dry eyes turned up to the cracks and details of he ceiling in front of his eyes. "You might want to start thinking about something other than typical classical and outdated things. It's been like this for what, years?"

" I will call security."

"Go ahead. Call them." Bojack's eyes settled back onto her challenging ones, and her eyes flared up in surprise; and then lowered into an abrasive quick whisper and insult.

"I'm serious, Bojack. I'll call the police. And I can do ways of making you look like you pulled me into thi tonight."

"Wow." Bojack's voice was blunt but the way his eyes widened a few inches showed off his vague effect she had on him, though for the most part his expression kept dry. "I did not know you were planning on making this an entire scheme. What a way to end the night. You could have just gotten the rest of the other people here in on it if you wanted to make a acne."

"But I don't want to." There was an edge of insistence to her voice as she spoke, her tone trembling as she tapped her fingertips beside the counter. Bojack kept the surprise of his inquiry inside of his expression even as he stepped his way back for the sake of his own comfortability; or at least what he could give himself at this point, what he would allow himself to. "I want us to go out like this quietly, for me to continue on with my business and you with your-" She tapped her hand onto the counter as she gave a casual roll of her eyes. "Your woman toy."

"No." His eyes darted down in thought, ears turned down fully. "Do what youw want. I need to take care of something."

The swan's eyes flashed, almost in something that suggested her own panic in her surprise of Bojack's indifference.

"There's a lot at stake here, Bojack. For you."

"And for you, too. So let's just keep our heads low, not worry or care about any of it, and go from there. We're both on the same age." His eyes lowered over to the page beside him as he could see how it had crumpled under his grasp; he tried to readjust his intense grip on it as he eased his hands away from where it clutched beside the paper. "I don't think that is the hardest part about any of this, all things considered."

"I need you to let me know that the woman is trustworthy. I could tell from the way she talked to me that there's a good chance that she picked up on something tonight." Her eyes turned down in a moment's frantic thought, and then she stepped forward as she rested her elbow beside the counter, talking to Bojack lowly as she spoke, eyes darting into an extension of paranoia; "Bojack, you can't trust a person who has nothing to lose. You can't give anything to a person that low. I'm promising you now, it won't end well for either of you."

"Yeah. Most of anything that I indulge in dosen't end well. It must be the reason why I'm doing underhand crack with a swan in the frist place who's doing it just to get by."

"Bojack, just tell me." Her slender hand reached out across the counter, and there was a guide of wet emotion in her eyes, edge of her expression red and riddled with emotion. "Reassure me."

"What do you want me to say?" Bojack stepped back further by a few paces, his arms raised above him as his voice raised by a few tones. "I can't read her goddamn mind. Part of my own plan now is to let her get back home to her own place, as in my place, and to realize that I'm not coming back until she goes. She's pretty smart that way; she'll put the pieces together of what I'm trying to do, more than likely. She reads me well. I'm literally betting my own idea of her on the idea that I don't trust her and I'm trusting her to make that apart of both of our advantages. What else would you expect from me?"

"Just tell me that I don't need to worry about you. I don't want to have to get you in trouble for the sake of my own if I can do anything for us to both reassure one another that that won't happen. This is my entire life-and I know it's a cope that you need."

"Not necessarily." His voice was low and somber, and nothing but a hard emotion plastered across his expression as he shook his head and looked at her with his dry and blunt, emotionless glare. "What do I care? I'm already done over here anyway. I've already done all the damage that I could possibly imagine and then some."

"Bojack, you can play whatever emotional games that you want when it comes to the heart and relationships-but this is legal trouble we're talking about."

"Tell me about it. Must be the reason why I decided to do it. Sometimes trouble is the only friend when everything seems terrible anyway. You can quote that to your next side underhand piece."

"This is my life. Something that I need to chose."

"Honey, believe me, you couldn't make it more clear that you're making things in your life as your choice. You have made that entirely clear with your-" She waved her pink hand dismissively beside her. "-Well, everything."

"Then it shouldn't matter if I want to go see him, should it?"

Princess Caroline's eyes lowered into dry exasperation. The car was almost on the edge of the bridge now, the traffic beside the car becoming more polluted with the busyness of the traffic. Her dry eyes kept darting to you now and then, as if trying to make a jabbing and earnest point.

"It matters because I came all this way, took an offer with a man that I normally wouldn't at this point in my career to help him, and spent my gas on coming to pick you up. And I know that if Bojack did this once, he'll no doubt ask for it again, and I know if I did it once, I'll keep giving in. Long story short, it's my job to tell you to not keep dragging this out now."

"You don't have to do anything. I'm sorry that Bojack ended up asking you to come." You turned your head over your shoulder as you gave you a slight look of insistence, though your other hand kept pressed on the side of the door. "You can even let me out right here. I don't mind."

"I-" Princess Caroline's expression treamored as her eyes flicked down in concerned thought, pink fingertips tapping beside the wheel as she continued to ease it through the traffic. "Look, I'm not just telling you this because I had to use up my time and resources to get over here because I can't say no. I know that you're getting caught up in him-and I know what it feels like to think it's a good idea." Her eyes turned to you, and there was a dry exhaust in them, hooded by her aged eyelids that came along with their years of experience, and though there was something dry and jaded about them, lifeless and the opposite of what you wanted to focus on within what you felt, you met her eyes, and there wa a sense of something worth being respected in her expression that came along with life experience; that, and an authentic need she had to help.

"You seem like a good woman. Maybe a little confused and dirty, and certainly not someone who is going to be making it in any kind of special way-but still incredibly worth making sure that you don't get caught up in trying to take care of that man's thumb for the rest of your life-and believe me, you will."

"I think I can make my own choice about what path I'd like to take." Your head turned back over to the door, and you began to press on it lightly with one day. The car was currently stopped in the traffic entirely due to the fact that it had slowed because of the congestion right before it entered the highway as the bridge began to lower, and as your eyes flicked over your shoulder you caught Princess Caroline's expression easing into a scrunched tension; there was more complicated emotion on her than she portrayed. "Espcially from someone who tries to tell me he isn't someone to get caught up in when you're here and actively trying to demoralize what you think my worth is. Whatever place the both of you came from, it seems to be the same one."

"Yeah. It is the same one." Princess Caroline breathed a shaky sigh as she turned her head down a few inches, and the wrinkles and wear on her face seemed as if it were more prominent than ever as her body curled down for a moment. You saw the especially dry exhaust of her eyes as she turned her head back upward-her fur spewed out in multiple directions, fingers gripped on the wheel. "I mean what I say when I tell you that Bojack is someone that is going to make your life miserable. I don't care where you came from, or who you are-he is who he is."

"He's generous. He's letting me stay at his house-and for no reason. Do you understand how rare that is?"

Princess Caroline offered with a intense glare of her eyes.

"Do you know how the world works? Why people like Bojack are so generous with their life and their space in the first place? Things like that don't just come out of nowhere for nothing. If he's giving you something so good and generous, it's because he expects this emotional, motherly payoff. He's going to end up asking you and begging you and draining you for everything you're worth. He's sweet, and he has a good heart, and there's this beautiful inner life inside of him that's like nothing else. He has this rich soul and sees things in a certain kind of way and opens up this entire understanding of life, and its warm and instrict and incredible-"

"But you think it would be better for me to take an empty life and to walk along the streets than it would be for me to stay with him."

Princess Caroline gave an abrupt, quick sight as her shoulders eased down in exhaust.

"I think you should think about what and where you want to invest in long term, and I promise you that with him it will kill you long term. I know you feel like you might be the execution to him. I told myself the same thing for decades. All you get is more strain and drain and attempting to tell yourself over and over again how much you hope that one day the strain will make sense. And I can promise you that he dosen't have the capacity to give you anything emotionally. Maybe he can give you a couch for a little while, a roof over your hand. But he's dangerous. Anyone who has ever been involved with him in the past few years would be able to tell you as much."

"I don't care." You said it with a certain kind of abrupt indifference; there was no hesitancy in your tone. Princess Caroline's eyes had a certain emotion of worry in them now that almost seemed too earnest in their regret; too forthcoming in their apology for you not to feel affected. But you continued to thread your hand beside the door as you gave it a light nudge; not in the idea that it would move, but only for the sake of letting her know your intention. "My entire life is dangerous. The world is devastating. There's nothing to be done about it for anyone except to find the most comfortable sense I can get."

"That's not what I'm talking about." Your head turned on instinct over your shoulder as you looked Princess Caroline over; her face was tense and furrowing as she turned her eyes down to her dash. "Erika, I am telling you that Bojack could physically hurt you. If you wanted to strain yourself and sacrifice your humanity for the sake of trying to be able to keep a roof over your head, I would say have at it. But I am telling you that whatever it is that you've suffered through in the streets, whatever man you've made compromise with, whatever detriment of some terrible person or illness you've had to endure, I promise you it will never be as bad as the things Bojack can do. He's sick. Maybe not the kind of sick you are. But just because two people are unhealthy dosen't mean that they have to come together and see every black way things are time and time again and remind one another of it."

"Then what would you want me to do?" Your eyes closed as you tried to keep the thick violence of your complex emotion to a close as much as you were able; the same way the inner conflict and erratic torment of life of your day to day existence had been enclosed under a desperate attempt of functionality and of superficial movement for the sake of keeping the indefinable madness to a close that came with a long term suffering life. "What better idea or solution would you rather have me do?"

Princess Caroline gave a soft intake of her breath, and the authentic troubled look in her expression didn't lesson in its tension as she flicked her eyes down in thought.

"I don't have any direct solutions for you. I do work at a big office company, but we have a high standard."

"A high standard?" Your brow raised up as you looked at her with a new sharp intention. You saw her visibly tense, her shoulders easing into herself with a vague tense and shame.

"Someone with experience. Someone who has-a way in, so to speak." Princess Caroline paused as her eyes flicked down in thought, and you could tell she was earnest in her words, though she was trailing them out in a lazy drawl of what seemed like a sense of shame, even as she meant it. "Someone with housing-"

"I need to get out."

Your body turned entirely to the door, hands jamming against it as you did so this time with more intention.

"Hey." Princess Caroline's eyes turned down in her usual cocky confidence and dryness. "Take it easy. I can still try to find you a place to live."

"Why do you care?" Your hand slammed onto the window in front of you, and you turned as you looked over at her sharply. Her expression tensed further as her hand gripped beside the wheel. "Because Bojack took interest and picked me up?"

"Yes." Her voice was blunt, and you gave her a flare of your expression. "But that isn't an insult, ok? Take it easy. I do it because I know that the woman he picks up on probably has something similar to what I had. I want to make sure no one has to go through what I did again if I can help it. I wouldn't have involved myself in something like this tonight otherwise."

"I don't care about whatever value you think you're trying to give me." Your hand jammed beside the door again, this time with a force enough that Princess Caroline's eyes abruptly widened as she slammed the break on just as the car was going to a slow toll down along with the sleepy traffic. "Please let me out."

"Let me take you to Bojack's place for the night, at least. I'm sure that's one sliver of something pure and worthwhile the man has given anyone that we can both celebrate and marvel at for one night."

"And what about going forward? This concern that you have for me-what is it for? Ae you going to do anything for me long term?"

"I told you the way things are. Maybe we'll have something worked out, maybe we won't. But at least you'll have the news of someone who knows what she's talking about because she lived it."

"I need to get out." Your fingertips began to tremble in insistence as you began to play with the handle of the car, the other trembling beside the lock.

"Do you even know how locked doors work?" Princess Caroline's eyes lowered into a dry exasperation as she saw your hand ease and slam beside the door when your fingertips were trembling too much to ease the lock open. "Have you ever even been inside of a door? Ever seen one?"

"Bojack has shown me more kindness, more openness to being in his home, has offered me more without any consequences or any caution about long term rules. He's the only person I've ever met in my life who just treated me like a regular person-exactly as I was in the moment." Your hand jammed back onto the car door, and Princess Caroline gave an abrupt yelp and then a hiss as she felt the force of you slamming your palm beside the door. "I know how to navigate my own path."

"Alright. Christ. Just stop hitting my door with your hands."

"Why? Are they too dirty, not good enough?"

"Yes." Princess Caroline's hand flicked over to the key, and the door beside your hands began to ease open as you saw the lock flick open. Your hand eased beside the door as you began to feel it crack open, and you gave an intake of an abrupt breath as you felt the polluted air outside, full of car gas and the general stench of the highway of the Los Angeles city street, whip against your face in the force of the gasoline that came in the air. But you jammed your elbow beside the door as you stepped your way out, turning your body out into the night that surrounded the metal cars reflecting on the yellow stagance of the yellow street lights that reflected beside the metal as you eased your way out. The wind whipped beside your skin as you pressed your arm to your face and kept your head down while you moved your way out; despite the fact that you knew the chances of a man or someone who knew you would recognize you, you and Bojack and had been seen with the rich and elite the entire night, people who had, to some extent, known him-you were sure that at least the majority were people who were driving their way home, and if you come to understand anything about human nature through any given financial level or corner of life, it was that people could sense what they considered a sick and wayward person when they saw them; someone not going along with their perfectly instinct way of life to keep them in a dry compartmentalized way of life.

"Make sure you transfer the rest of the money that Bojack gave you over to my office before you get to the side of the street you'll die on! It'll be a lot more useful somewhere and with someone that can actually use it!"

Your hands pressed beside the scattered old fabric that was wrapped and flying beside your body as you turned your head down and tried to keep the fabric cloth flying as you turned your head down to keep the wind from flying across your expression as the force of it flashed across your face. You could already begin to feel the demanding cold coming over you, and you could feel that natural physical regret while you began to turn your head over to the compact cars that were polluting the highway; there wasn't an inch between the cars while the sound of the gasoline and the reflected metal of the yellow lights stayed polluted and jammed against one another through the highway. Your palms gripped further beside your arms as you stepped your way further out from the door, feeling your throat already becoming dry from what was ahead of you. You felt a thrill of an exhausted and dry ringing and a vague melancholic mood at the idea of having to make your way through the congested traffic, and you remembered now in full detail the countless long empty nights that came along with the way you had wandered the streets once the black and hollowed feeling of want of home had instead rested into an exhausted sickly numb, the way your disortenation had taken your physicality until your mind had wandered without direction. The sky was black and bleak in its indifference, though there was the occasional hint of gray clouds that was polluting and scattering the front of the sky as it continued to pass by the buildings.

"Close the door, queenie. If you're going to make these kind of decisions, at least make sure that you go through with them all the way."

"Do you remember where we drove from?"

Your head turned over to Princess Caroline; her slender body was leaned to the side of the car, lazily turned forward, and any little sympathy that she had spared before in her eyes was now gone with nothing but dry rot and indifference and exasperation.

"The museum? It's the same place down the corner of the street. Shut the door. I'm freezing my whiskers off." She leaned her body back against the chair, her hands easing forward onto the wheel as she leaned back. "If you want to change your mind, now is the perfect time. Otherwise, stop letting the damn chill in and go ruin your life without any help. See if anyone will stop you."

"I know." Your voice was already becoming as weak and unimpressive as much as it had always been while your voice hitched beside your dry throat as your hand trembled while turning to the side of the door, and you stepped forward entirely as you kept your other hand frantically gripped beside the fabric to keep it form bellowing out and away in its small multiple threads and rips that dressed your body. "I've been hearing that my entire life."

Princess Caroline gave a grunt of a breath, her body now leaned forward but indifference.

"Must be the reason why you go to men like Bojack and think it's the most pure intended thing in the world. Or why you end up on the streets."

"Your offer was all the reminder I needed about why I don't bother to worry about including anyone else through my life. By, Caroline."

"Princess Caroline. Someone who's been able to tolerate Bojack a lot better than you have. What did he even do at the museum to make him want to take you home alone with someone else driving? Was this his sort of sick twisted idea of a date?"

Your hand slammed the door closed, though now that even the feeling of the artificial heat was gone from warming your body, you could now feel the true extent of the cold and the demand of the whipping of the air that was surrounding your body. Your torso turned forward as your hips leaned in front of you while your body eased inward, hands gripped beside your arms as you began to shoulder the fabric beside your body further to keep the rags from snapping away from your body; as tattered as what Bojack had given you had been, it had been a loving gesture, though you had wanted to keep your own rags anyway for the sake of remembrance of independent identity, and the end result of several fabric and rags torn from their threads that was now falling apart, and you struggled to find where some of the broken threads were falling off and leaving empty open tattered fabric and which ones weren't.

You began to shoulder your way through the flimsy and suffocated, narrow space that the cars barely left as you began to shoulder your way through them, trying o navigate your body through the small space through the metal and the windows. All of the windows were thick and black and shut, leaving no room for you to look into the people within them; but as you walked your way in through the barely open and narrow space that the cars left while they continued to lazily move forward and over the bridge, you could tell just from the metal decor of their cars and the shining edge of the tires and the gold that traced it that they were at least some of the elite that had been with you and Bojack at the party. You felt your head turned down as you gripped your hands beside your arms while you continued to ease your way through the small space the cars left. Your head kept turning up and over to the cluttered buildings that were beside you that was about a mile or less away as your body kept shouldered within yourself to keep you from standing out as much as you could manage, though you knew you had that erratic and more mentality and the natural way your walk of life had wretched you, hair strangled out into knots, dress scratched and tattered and torn and feeling the threads of fabric fall from your hands as they fell onto the ground as you continued to trip your way forward and through the cars, feeling increasingly more lost in your story and in your fears and more separated entirely from the people that surrounded you, as if separated from an entirely different species in your pain and isolation, and only wishing for what Bojack had given you in what was behind every fear and empty sickly craving you had ever experienced; the trial of experiencing the same day to day life and thought together, of sharing in emotional and human suffering and insecurity, of feeling as if you had a home and an understanding from someone else extended from yourself; the most worthwhile thing and human thing that was behind every craving you had ever known, ever sense of dissassicaotion and of s surreal sense of loneliness in your exsitence, such as you felt now.

You continued to walk your way past the cars, tripping over yourself as you gave a hitch of your breath, being aware of the dryness of your throat while the cold wind continued to flash and tamper beside your skin. You could feel the fabric start to fly off of your hands, and you huddled further within yourself, keeping your head turned forward as much as you were able to white you continued to ease your way down the cars. Though you could feel your blood rushing and were on high alert, and kept switching your eyes up to the dark tinted windows now and then, no one turned their windows down to catcall or to mock you, though you could feel the nature of their judgment from the comfortability of the inside of their metal heated leather cars while you continue to trip your way through the space of the humming of the traffic,

You could already feel your skin becoming more scratched up and your breathing more unhealthy than it had been for the past couples of days ina a good long while, and you kept walking forward and you gave a dry hitch of your breath while walking out and over to where the cars were becoming fewer and more far between as the road began to pass out and over into the more empty street; the cars beside you were now few in number and scattered in between as you now began to quicken your pace through the open space that cars left, your head snapping up as your feet tripped over themselves in their quick and timid rush while you sped your way past the cars. One man turned his head out as he pulled the window down just as he had finished leaving the corner of your eyeview; his car had a far more poor and tattered look to it in its battered from. You had sped up your pace, but you managed to be able to hear the man's malicious and clearly drug induced tone as he called out with a wavering voice;

"You better keep your head on and your head upright, little lady! It's good for ya that Bojack decided to see what was true for him for a little while. Makes everyone else that isn't a little pathetic, don't it?" A large cackled amusement from the man's tone. Your eyes continued to blink frantically as you continued to rush your way down the street as you heard his cackled and dry amusement. He honked his horn, and you winced at the cut through of the alarm. "Beep beep! Might be too late anyway-the clock's always been ticking!"

You continued to rush your way down the street; evidently this side of the road had been more cracked and busted and ignored, your head snapped down as you continued to try and ease your breath through the dry crack of your throat as much as you were able to while your pale feet rushed down the street, tripping over the cracked and open busted streets while you rushed your way down the buildings and stores that made up downtown Los Angeles; the windows now closed for the night, lights dimmed off.

You tried to think through your frantic and uncomfortable though as your snapped your head to building to building, tripping over your feet as you rushed your way down the street, turning your head over from one building to another as you tripped and scratched your feet over the imploded and cracked pavement, letting out your own swears now and then as you felt the pavement continuing to crack beside your feet as you felt yourself give an abrupt hiss of pain. Your body temperature was lowering, your hands gripped beside your arms as you continued to rush your way down the street, your eyes, which were now becoming increasingly more dry and snapped with the wind, snapping upward as you began to take note of the large looming building that sat and clustered between the stores; you could see now the large pointed architecture of the building of the museum, the pointed and molded edge of the museum pointed upward and jammed into the flight blue and night sky that the pointed building and its cone disappeared into into the foggy polluted night.

The front lights were still on, the warm stagance of the light greeting to the front of the entrance and of the carving of the archway, Your breath continued to bellow from your lips as you felt the red of your cheeks protrude as you rushed your way over to the front entrance of the building, stopping as the cracked of the grandiose stairs and of the two large and long patches of grass that wore at least half a mile to it's entrance and of the long white sidewalk that lead to it guinding to its entrance, warm ease of the light threaded through the entrance.

"Bojack." Your voice trembled around his name as you turned your eyes and its increasingly blurry sight over through the yard, feet stepping forward abruptly as you began to rush your way down the sidewalk, eyes turned up and expression red on the edge with the whipping of the air that surrounded you. You knew that calling out to him now was futile; he wasn't here, but you spoke his name the same way you had ever done anything; to ease some sense of peace of belief into your headspace, to clear your mind from losing and forgetting the specific thread of emotion and of life he had given you that had granted you quality identity of being understood by someone else and of sharing in the genuine worthwhile meaning that came from behind known and loving in kind, rather than to have it be lost to alien invalidation and of the memories of the way he had come into your life being swept away into a foggy and empty disascioative nothing beyond comprehension, until now even you remembered what he meant to you or how he had enrichened your life, and returning you to empty nothing in kind, just as the world saw you or ever had, with not patience of getting to know the rich life of a stranger at all, even as it was the only rewarding thing and what people suffered for robbing from themselves. To the world, you would always been unseen and nothing, and there was nothing you could do to change that reality; but you could know yourself, and sharing in yourself and in Bojack had given you that coherent identity, and now that you had it, you knew you would have rather died than to become the very nothing the world had lazily labeled you and everyone else had with a deft and indifferent hand, knowing that an inner rich life was possible; and what a difference it was from your perception, the only thing you could control.

"Hello?"

Your hand eased the door open to the museum as you began to step your way back into the suffocated and empty stagance of the museum.

"Bojack?" You stepped your way inside as you shouldered your way inward, hearing the creek that came from the open door as you made your way inside. The light of the museum was still gently trailed from the occasional sparks and the golden lights that came from where several different spotlights were peaking out and over through the statues, threading and reflecting against the floor and reflecting against the marble hallway, showing off the slight hint of the floating small debris and dust that surrounded the air of the hallway. Though the air was stagnant and was heavy in its pollution from the day of the sweat of the intimacy of the bodies and of the crowding of pleasure and of the dry and old statues and collected dust of the material that surrounded the hallway, it was far warmer in there than the outside. Your hand reached from behind you as your hand trembled through the fabric as turned to the door, threading your palm beside it as your hand gripped against it and began to close it on its hinges, leaving an ancient echo in its wake.

"I was just about to leave." A slight dismissive light laugh as she played with the paper. " I should have known."

Your eyes eased up into an alarm as you heard the soft thrill of the same swan voice that Bojack had taken to pleasuring himself with earlier. The heavy stagance of the air continued in its thickness as you continued to walk your way down the hallway, your body walking through the echoing of the stagance of the space while you walked your bare feet down the cold marble, the lukewarm light of the spotlight reflecting across your body as you walked your way over to the much darker receptionist area, head tilting as you looked over to the desk, the white long neck of the woman behind it being the only thing that stood out from the dim dark of the light that continued darker where the rest of the museum must have been shut off for the night.

"Where is Bojack?" Your voice landed into the dry and indifferent air of the hallowing space that surrounded you, and you found that you would have preferred the familiar devastation of the outside and the odd irony of the idea that your sense of lack of home was more soothing and comforting than this; the hallowing of where you had felt Bojack's gradual abandonment.

The swan paused, and she seemed to be trembling with some detached conflict that was surrounding her air. You saw her turn her head back to the hallway, and caught site of her long eyelashes fluttering in front of the hallway, reflected by the edge of the security light. You could catch the loom of the emotion that was reflected across her face, traced by the illuminated blue light.

"He left someone for you in the sake of communication."

You stepped forward, arms gripped further beside your chest as your expression tentatively began to pick up on the conflict of her energy.

"Are you ok?"

The swan turned her head sharply to the side. You visibly stepped back, if only fort the abrasive anger that seemed to be in the action as her head sharply turned to the side.

"I think you need to focus on why things are the way they are for you. How every theme, no matter how small,, is relevant and leads to something else. There isn't a lot of time left, and even less humanity."

The silence filled the empty air for a moment.

"I've never had anything my entire life." Your voice echoed bitterly across the foggy extent of the space, and the swan bitterly chuckled as she shook her head and leaned it back forward to the hallway. "The one thing that comes along with that is the constant richness that comes along with having nothing of seeing it as a companion rather than an enemy like most. The same with especially caring about anything of what happens. Despair has been something I stopped fighting and rather became, and its been nothing but a soothing black defeat of belonging since; and as it turns out, that's all anyone wants, is belonging."

"No." The swan turned her head forward as her head shook lightly. "If that were true, if you were truly free and one with suffering, you wouldn't have had the care of coming back here for Bojack."

Your eyes snapped across her body as you looked her over.

"I just want to know where he is."

"Do you know where the basic idea of where letters are?"

"I don't care about how lowly you think of me. I just want to know. For the sake of my own sanity in a black life-I'm nothing but lost. Please-"

"You thought that he was simply just trying to make it so that he wouldn't have to see what you ended up going through with once you placed together that he was just putting you inside of his house for you to rot." The swan snapped her body around so abruptly that it caused your eyes to widen as you stepped back and allowed the swan woman to abruptly rush her way around your body and back over to where she had just left the compute. Your arms kept crossed and tense as you turned your head over your shoulder and watched her snap her hands over several files and paper, moving them to the side with the same sharp and rushed movement as her narrow eyes snapped down to where she looked over at the envelope.

"Here it is." She was vaguely out of breath as she eased her narrow eyes up, balancing the envelope into the spaces of her fingertips as she handed it to you. It had a vague purple tint to it, and the part that made your heart lurch; Bojack's name written in what seemed like shaky cursive on the front. You felt your energy change from the foggy denial to a snap of sudden clarity as you turned your eyes down to the envelope, then eased your expression up to the swan as you met her eyes.

"Better for you to just have it and for me to know that you have it, rather than tripping over whatever Bojack does later if he finds out that somehow it didn't get into your hands."

Your hand trembled as you took it; not so much for the physical fact that now you were looking at a long walk up the street, through the traffic and back to Bojack's empty house; not that walking on the side of the road was something foreign to you, but you needed to make the right direction, or you knew that you wouldn't see Bojack again unless it was under the unlikely scenario that your paths crossed, but for the emotional context under it.

Though it felt oddly pathetic, you turned your head up to the woman and gave her a curt nod. The swan's eyes wasn't friendly, but rather cold and unreadable. She turned her narrow eyes downward as she simply readjusted the bag against her shoulder, then began to quickly snap her body away from the back of the counter as she walked her way out from the back of it with the same quick and robotic ease.

"You better contact him when you get back to his house, if you can. The man has plenty of phone lines in his house, more luxury than he ever even knew what to do with, so make sure you take advantage of that. If you don't, he'll end up calling me, and I'll be the one who has to deal with it."

Your fingertips turned down to the envelope, and though you felt more bad than you did good at the idea of it, you lifted your fingertip under the front of the envelope underneath the material of your hands. You gave a slight hitch of your breath, wincing as you felt the feel of the whiskey and of the clear sense of suffering from Bojack's foggy and disoriented action coming from the paper, and as you opened the lette further, you saw how it had clearly been handled with an unclear and shaky mind; the pages were ripped and crumpled, the edges torn and tattered. The smell of the whiskey and the vague stretch of someone who took pills and had the physical sickness of their sickness from the action follow and flow up and over through your face as you felt yourself retech without meaning to, and your head turned as your thrusted your head away from the paper if only a few inches.

You must have let out a noise that was akin to something ease out a noise in some kind of emotional mourning, because as you turned your head to the side if only to get a break from how horribly and mournful it felt to take in such sickness and knowing the lack of reality of it getting better, you caught the expression of the swan standing beside you, her body turned to the side halfway as she gazed at you with a dry brow. You already knew that more was happening and more was going on from when Bojack had indulged himself onto her-the parts of him that had felt like a maddening release into something true and authentic in raw human experience that he had executed to you in the rasp of his words and the warm embrace of his arms as he had led you in; the blackest part of your dread was under the impression that that part had detached entirely tonight, and that was only one of the countless reasons for your sudden upheaval of a sense of lack of home again, this sensation now far more devastating than the any other physical nature of the devastating strain you had ever felt.

"He's not planning on reaching out to either of us, is he?"

The swan woman's expression remained unreadable as her eyes traveled across your body, expression hard and unreadable; but her emotion seemed to give her away from underneath the hard protective layer that in the past you had always ascribed to disgust in regards to how people felt about you.

"You have that ethernal and true feel about you. I can see why Bojack was terrified of you. Even just as myself, and I'm not as nearly as sick as he is, I'm not sure how to feel around the truth you represent."

"What is that?"

"Suffering. The true art and depth that comes from the long and uninterrupted rhythm of suffering. Possible the biggest wisdom that will ever be given. I've done everything to avoid it, and I feel as if I"m less than half as human as you." She tilted her head to the side, cocking her head as she looked you over. "There's something about suffering that seems to promise its reward of ultimate beauty, dosen't it?"

"But only if you survive it." You turned your head down to the letter, the paper that was crumpled in Bojack's tentative fingertips only half peeking out from it. "And the part you don't realize is that it takes every day to survive it; and I don't know if there's ever been a time I have ever been marked to ever have, or if I'll ever wake up to a day when I don't question if today will be the day where something gives out, or when the pain gets worse in ways I can't even imagine."

The swan woman lifted her brows in a slight dismissive jadedness. She turned her head to the side as she gave a small nod, thought it seemed bitter in that naturally dismissive way people carried so well.

"What you should be asking yourself is as to why you showed up here in the first place."

Your head turned as you watched the swan begin to walk her way, quick paced over to the front of the open end of the large hallway. You turned, timidly, but still with question as you kept the letter under your arm as you began to follow her down the hall. Her heels snapped against the floor as they echoed in their cheap echo, and your eyes snapped up in an extension of sickly question as you began to step lightly over to the front of the archway with the yellow stagnant light surrounding the entrance.

She seemed to have already moved on, quickly and without pause, but for the sake of prolonging the sickness Bojack's letter gave you did you continue to follow her over to the archway, keeping back a few paces. She raised her slender arm up and over her head as she began to walk her way to the archway, her hand gripping in the key in her hand as she twisted it up and over to where she had a long purple sports care that sat in front of the entrance. You heard the car beep, and you kept back just enough so that it didn't seem as if you were following her for more answers. She indicated her head over to the car that was in front of her with her hand waving forward to it, seeming to amuse herself with her own antics as she eased her elbow beside the door and began to walk her way out; they were tall and heavy enough that the one she elbowed sat in its place, easing in the cold breeze from the outside. The car seemed to come from a wealthy enough type, and you knew just from the kind of night Bojack had had that it cane from the majority of things illegally. The car beeped against as she began to step her curvy, pouted body to the car as her heels eased down the steps, hips swaying as she made her way over to the car until you heard the door open. The car's engine started, and as you began to hear the rumble of her independent wealth begin to meld in with her now absence, you were more aware than ever about the bleak options Bojack had left you with.

Your eyes turned down to the envelope that you had eased calmly under your arm. You knew that for yourself, a lifetime of every moment of dreaming and longing for bonding and love to a maddening degree and the very few chips and pieces you were left in even smaller phases of convenience, if it could even be called love, had been all that had been marked as something that happened in reality and not just in a foggy and dreamlike state of something that happened in the back of your mind of something that wasn't possible in reality. For Bojack, a man you had understood that, for all his opportunity and for all of his ways with woman, he had his own version of that tormented and long term emptiness and loneliness, and certainly had made it clear that he was used to the on and off of relationships, and even expected it. For him to leave him even this letter as communication, with the reputation he had and the expectancy of how he carried himself and what could barely be called human relationships, it was a miracle he had even given you that much in the first place.

Your eyes lowered down to the card. It was, undeniably, Bojack's scrawled and unfocused writing, and you can see just from the occasional glimpse of words that were scrawled and threaded against the paper that they were more cut and emotional with their tone and intention that made you feel as if you would have been choked with a certain kind of in deniable nostalgia and emotion just for being able to hear it. A life that you had made with Bojack, even within the short time you had known him, was a connection that had executed and threaded into into profound complexity within an inner spiritual narrative that was indefinable to express, and already had it seemed to take on ancient eons of an inner layered world that was only experienced on the inside, unacknowledged in it's unfathomable complexity, but something that carried the both of you, and you certainly felt the heaviness of true meaning for one another.

There was a child inside of him, you knew that much; one that was lost, insecure and prone to being easily explosive, if only for the simple fact that he knew that no matter how hard he tried, it would never be enough for anything. Nor for the indescribable anything that was beyond your bond, not for what the both of you shared or anything tangible as a whole.

That was what he thought, and that was certainly the narrative that he was going with now; there was no point in even trying to in an effort in such an unrelenting endless pit, and a part of you, as you heard the car starting up while the lights turned on as it began to rumble away and down the street, the yellow lights from the car reflecting from it while reflecting beside the walls of the museum and the indifference of the mechanical engine moving forward down the street, you felt yourself agreeing with the philosophy more than you ever had in his absence.

You pressed your hands around the front of the paper while you tore it away from the rest of its envelope, and you could feel the world shift around you if only from the anxiety alone about the inner layered world the both of you shared that held more height and caring to it than you had ever felt in your lifetime; and the luxury of what you had described to the swan woman that came with having nothing to lose was jabbed with a black pit of the understanding that that luxury of freedom was now gone.

You felt that inner life and its richness overcome you regardless as you began to unfold the carefully made letter; the way that you always did whenever you heard that soft rasped nuance of a voice. He allowed himself to speak it every now and then with you when he had held you at night, when his insecurity had begun to fall away after hours of interaction and talk, and with him soothing you with rasped voice guidning beside your body as you had held and comforted you with words that were emotionally intelligent and stoic, especially for someone that seemed to doubt his virtue so often.

The feeling of that preciousness would be the execution of his mind and body as he would guide you through the times when you could be broken out into a panicked sweat whenever you realized just how comfortable you were, how the grit of the emotional layers that had long since accepted the impossible idea of being inhuman and yet taking it into belief had fallen away into a devastating relief, and Bojack had been unrelenting in his emotional intelligence as you felt the lovability of his chubby arms wrap around your body, his voice played soft and tender-the one that was always trying even when he felt as if he wasn't, and most especially when he thought that he wasn't.

As you had placed your hands around the side of his love handles, through the clammy sheets that spoken of home and rhythm and rich intimacy, you had gripped his lovehandles into your palm, and you had felt his tension; but intimacy and emotional vulnerability the same was in bondage, and it had been something that had previously seemed only a foggy thought or a fantasy; you knew there was a good chance it still was, the relief from the past two weeks on a glimpse into a phase of a man who had used you for his plot device to use you gently rather than rough, but a plot device was a plot device.

You couldn't take your eyes off of the letter now as you made your way over to the computer table without thinking about it; the words were drawing you into that rhythm of focus, just as everything Bojack did and was did. You sat at the counter right in front of you, your body easing down onto the back of the office chair without keeping your eyes away from the letter. From emotional impact alone did you feel reality physically shifting in front of you, and the words were written in his authentic and lovable heart and tone that you could hear in his reflective voice that you knew that he could have-that timeless beautiful part of him that you felt was the entirety of him and of the wonder of how he had stretched out the world in a timeliness and tragic beauty that only the young were allowed to feel within their freedom and the inherent sympathy the world had dealt out to them; but with you being homeless and not following the rules and following the thread of the endless possibility of existence daily, you had had no choice but to carve out that artistic beauty yourself, and it had been a long and lonely process; enough to the point that the isolation in and of itself could have made that indescribable longing give out.

But what had occurred within the both of you that was no seen within another was that especially large reward when he allowed himself to believe it himself; the stretch of the beauty that only came from an artistic and tormented person, though far from good, someone who still had that purity that was ignored and shoved aside to the world while evil and pettiness prevailed daily.

You didn't even realize that you were beginning to lose all feeling as your body leaned back beside the chair, all sense of the atmosphere around you beginning to blur, the letter, even in all of its sickness and dysfunctionality, causing you to feel that rhythm of how his words took you in right along with the sickness of the black devastation of anxiety as your hand trembled while gripping around the paper.

You probably hate me when you're reading this right now. If I thought that last night wasn't going to make you hate me, then I guess I'm just making my next step forward. But I'm doing this because I know me, and I hired a woman that knows me to let you know that this is the real reality of how things are, not just something we created in our heads the past few days for what we wish was true. I've done that my entire life, and I know it more than anymore.

Some days it feels like that I can make it, whatever 'it' is that I thought I could give you ok, and more and a lot of days I can't. What I do know is that I know myself well enough to know what is happening, why it's happening, and can certinaley predict where it's going. Normally I would just let these tormented thoughts fly behind my headspace and just let them happen, but I know I respect you too much for that. And the place I've been mentally these past few days, months, while I sat and had nothing but time to think and reflect turned out to be all I needed to realize what I was and what I wanted, and it was something I always knew but never allowed myself to sit and fester in. To think about. I knew what I needed to do in order to get to where I needed to be. I've always belonged in black defeat. It's the only thing that's true to me. It's the only thing that ever has been. I realized that more than ever when I stopped distorting myself with people and activities and pursuits I knew that for whatever reason, not everyone gets. Not everyone is made for happiness or what we call relationship, and I know I belong where the few people I've admired went.

When I took you in, it was a selfish act. If your own way, which I admire and has been more clever than I've ever been trying to survive in my own house, you were clever enough to make it by. You would be better off walking and taking your emotional and mental tools daily and continuing to do use that fire in your eyes or something akin to it. I'll admit that I was drawn to it from the start, and I wanted to do one more selfish act of making you relevant and affected by this mess, and I want you to know that I do deeply apologize for that.

I guess that at this point taking my leave in the attempts of not hurting you, I'm hurting you. That's the irony of my entire thing, and that's the reason why you can always know that like I said last night, I'll probably be more punished for this more than you'll ever be. Even if it doesn't feel like it right now. I promise you it will get easier. Just not right now. I've memorized and observed the woman around me and people's mental patterns; I know what it's like. You're hatred and gradual dislike of me will come over you, and I know you'll be protected. I don't think I'm capable of that; I'm not sure what happens to me when life continues to go on. I don't hate or fall out of love; it just becomes this dry void and the wrestling of guilt, and I promise you it won't go away for many years, if ever.

I'm still not good enough at letters in a way that doesn't feel like I'm basically just telling you all the ways in which I wish I didn't do this to you. I wish there was a way I could save you up from the way that I could've told you in real life.

Some of the words were blotched out by what looked like several splatters of whiskey and what might have been crumpling of Bojack's hands and of any liquid that might have spilled from the bottle that you could now imagine the swan handing to Bojack casually in the middle of her dismissive ease; though Bojack was the kind of man who didn't seem to especially care about his physical wellbeing, there was a natural life intelligence and grace to him that let you know that even in the largest and blackest part of his suffering and usual, you knew that he wouldn't be the kind of man to drool. That natural pure and raw grace followed him everywhere.

That's kind of frustrating, isn't it? I wrote this to try to make it easier on the both of us, but this probably might just make it harder for you. I don't know how you're going to react, and maybe that's making it easier on me. Which only proves why I do this and why I believe what I do it for myself even more. I'm not sure if I believe in people being good people anymore. I've seen too many people be naturally dismissive and selfish too easily, and it;s made me feel more dry and lwo energy throughout my life more than I can explain, and the devastation has been irreparable. But I've done it to myself, and I do it the worst of anyone I know.

To help you get off that delusional hallucination that comes along with hormones off of your shoulders, I only want to hope that you'll be able to see it, too. The way that there's nothing lost, and if anything I'm sure this will lead you to a more quality experience long term. You're the kind of woman who is good at picking up traits and ways of being able to reinvent things, and I've never met someone like that; I don't know if there's meant to be certain people on this earth naturally made for other people for some indescribable reason, but if there was, I would only believe it without insulting it because of what we've shared. And I mean that. I hope you can mean it a little for yourself, too.

I wish I could tell you that there would be a beautiful day for me to recover and eventually tell you I can be with you and that what I"m doing to you only goes under the category of 'right now,' for a little while, but that would just be me telling you something I know you're smart enough to see through, so I decided to put you in a situation where you can fully feel and see and think for yourself how this is the past. And, as much as I can be whistle doing that to you, I'm sorry for that, too.I

I know how much you love hearing about my fascinating stories about getting into a fight more often than not every time I go out, and if it eases your headspace in regards to worrying about where I'll be or doing for the next few days to keep that complex mind of yours for going wild, it's more than likely going to be something similar to that. Most of the time it's just some guy that looks at me in the eye into a convenience store, because for some reason they feel they're allowed to have a massive throw down on me the second that I even come in, for their entertainment. Whether or not it's because I know who I am before I even have a chance to try to be human, instead of a celebrity, or for some other reason people in this town harbor for some strange reason, I don't know.

But there was this one time I went into a convenience store, and I saw this really specific man sitting behind the glasses section for a little while. I was having one of those days where I was feeling a little bit bigger and a little bit too foggy headed than usual, even though I didn't want to admit that I was, but I felt disgusting. When I saw that man that was sitting there on the shelf, otter type, I saw him holding a book or magazine cover in hs hands. He kept looking up at me, this guy, and this was about a few days before I met you. I saw how he kept turning his eyes up to me now and then while he gazed at me with this vague challenge or inquiry or something similar that was snapped into his eyes, this odd..calm of some judgemental observation wrapped around him without being completely consumed by it like I felt like I was on that day. I've come to the conclusion that we as a species seem to enjoy even our own conflict and sin and the ways we destroy one another because even that is excitement and meaning, like some twisted form of trying to fight and stagance and fall into wonder but in a twisted and wrong way.

After a long time of meeting his darting eyes now and then, as if to tell him and ask him what he was going on about giving me that lazy question eye, still recovering from a hangover and trying to pick myself up from the past few nights of drinking myself to death and spending the days stumbling around downtown trying to rub it off, I started to get more curious-or, maybe disassociated and angry is more of the right word, since I know how annoying and entitled people can be if they think you amuse them for while.

I turned to him fully just as I began to finish paying for my items at the cashier., and I didn't shy down giving him that dry and stagnant look in my eyes, or giving him that quirked brow judgment that usually scared at least a few people off into shame.

By the time I finished paying for the things I didn't even want but needed to get to keep my mind off of things, the boring things that I know I don't need but keets me just distracted enough to keep existing, I knew that it was gonna be good if I allowed that guy's judgment and his disapproval for what was then whatever weird reason to continue to affect me and turn me into that poison from the inside out if I could help it like I have in the past so many times. It's incredibly hard but, required, to realize that the way people treat you and how they do and any outward preception can't be used to define yourself, because it's always changing. It's fickle and tiring and exhausting to constantly try to measure your worth based on outward circumstances when the world so clearly just keeps going on without you and there's nothing you can ever do thats enough to be apart of it. That used to be all I had. In some ways, it still is. Though I'd be lying if I said that in the past week, I've been reminded of this small, vague glimpse that comes into focus when I'm around you where there's this entire world of this small niche corner of what you are to me. You introduced me to something I didn't know existed. You introduced me to the idea of a specific way of a certain kind of personal magic that is intimate enough that it's all I would have wanted. To be seen, known, to have that intimacy from the inside out and to have this stretch of a inner life together that has this certain flavor of magic and inner life that's only relevant to the concentration of the two of us. It's small, and only exists in the attempt of easing against one another, but it does exist-and when I focus on the feeling of it, that profound personal beauty of it, it's something that makes me realize I never even wanted any of that other stuff that I thought was all that I wanted. That it was irrelevant. I've struggled my entire life not to listen to broken people and to not follow the constant mainstream of the majority, and I don't know how to stop. But when I focus on that feeling I have with you, the feeling stops entirely.

Of course, this otter man that was gazing at me with that stink eye comes over and cackles at me when I give him that challenging look, though apart of me felt this strange soothing feeling that day that someone even too it upon themselves to laugh at me or acknowledge me at all. When I asked him why he was laughing, he just said that it was funny how he just felt better looking at me. When I asked him what he meant by that, he casually winded down while he stood by me and began to rearrange some of the magazines and told me that he just felt better. I assumed at the time that he meant that I was a joke to him and that he felt immensely better about himself by taking in whatever he observed as worthlessness, but now I'm not so sure. He says I was a rare breed, and even though he never said anything about recognizing me physically and seemed bewildered when I asked him if he knew me from my shows, he just said that I was coming from a place far better than that in what he saw and that I shouldn't focus on that. I was confused and frustrated as to what he meant by that at the time, but after what happened so soon after, I'm not so sure anymore that for once it was a bad thing, just casually and rudely executed, like most people.

A little time has passed since then, and I know we both know what happened tonight. When I saw her with her slim figure and the promises she made to me that felt too much like the me I know, I knew I couldn't turn back from it. Though I wanted to be the person, or maybe partner, or someone who takes in your existence in some way that could possible be positive, for you, I know that I can't.

I never really stopped thinking about it until tonight-what the otter man said a little while before I met you. I still had the plan to jump over the bridge, and no amount of emotional wisdom could have changed that, or any attempt of positive philosophy. I've always known that there must be a reason as to why people feel the way they do-that no one tries enough to know anyone, and even does the opposite of abusing people at every turn, and that's all there is. But the knowing dosen't change anything.

I know it sounds stupid, but I think I can be honest at this point that I can be real to you about just how stupid it is the way my mind gets caught up in the most petty things like that sometimes.-and those things I'll keep coming back to, because it's all I know, and I accepted a long time ago that all I can give myself anymore is the comfortability of all I know, because it's the only relief I'll ever get. And I try to find some sort of meaning for me to get why that is and how ti got that way, but sometimes a broken candy is just broken, and it's too entangled to even see where the entanglement even began at this point, if the beginning didn't just already sweep away into a cotton fog in the first place.

I won't ie and say I ever actually believed that I ever could have given you the day I wanted. I don't think I ever could. Where there used to be this erratic and implosive light of that specific life of a quality life that I could never quite pin down, I know now that it's about something that you've given me, and I thought the atmosphere of the place could do the work for me, because God knows that I can't give it to you because of anything inside me. I never saw that specific man again, or ever understood his general sentiment, but I think I get what he saw inside me now, if nothing else.

I want you to know these next few days will be far from romantic, and that what is coming up next will be a punishment you didn't sign up for. For a few days there's going to be nothing but terrible rumors and articles and comments.-people speculating about you and about me and why I went to this place tonight and if that woman dosen't manage to keep her mouth shut and to not spin this out even worse than it already is, I know you'll get dragged into even further. I'm aware enough to know I'm not by far the biggest man by any means or stretch of the imagination anymore, but I do have a lot of connections, and there were a lot of big names tonight, and I don't want either of us to deny the reality of the second hand nature of being exposed to that.

I got a taste of something that I've been wanting for a long time now. But it didn't have the experience of something the way it should have today,, because I ruined it with something that I wanted it to be and scared myself away from knowing that it could be that. And at my age, with the constant cycle of people detrimentally messing you up, and angering you, gasligthing you and making you feel like the only person on earth who just wants something good, blaming you and haunting you for every goddamn thing while you're already wretched and torn with your own thoughts anyway-after certain point, there's nothing left. I don't even know where the blame starts and where it's justified and where it ends, who is to blame or what caused what, I just know that there's nothing left of me. Enough to the point where I don't mind anymore-I just want that usual familiar comfort.

If anything else is going to be the way that I wanted it to be, it's only going to be the sickly reflection of tonight, because I had already spoiled my mouth and my body today with everything that I possibly could, and I know that if I cracked tonight in terms of making this a real and good thing, I will all other nights after-and you deserve to know that. I don't feel in control of my patterns, but they must be there, because I certainly feel the end result of them.

If I hadn't already indulged myself tonight in a way that was far too recognizable just to appease the constant black narratives inside of me without any reprieve, I do know that I would have stayed with you tonight. I know it beyond anything. I don't know how much that is worth to you, and maybe it's nothing, and I'm ok with that, and I understand it. In your own way, you have no problem telling people like it is, and I know you've had the life experience to earn it being compelling listening to with your life experience.

But I'm too busy gorging myself on that bloated rotten candy, and I know people will keep taking it because the world loves trash people and feeding them, which is more than likely how my life has been for so long. Unless by some miracle terrible grow a clear sight in their terrible taste in candy as much as they lack a clear sight in movies and what makes up the pollution of peoples' minds. Which wouldn't surprise me. But it does still make me wonder what I could have done to be able to give you what I want to be able to consistently give you, but I earnestly mean with all sincerity that I don't know how to do that, and I can't promise I ever will.

I'm giving you a chance to clear your head in the respect of the same place where you found some solace for a little while. I won't be there for while you clear your head to figure it out-and you'll be grateful later. I wouldn't kick you out on the street, I think I'm incapable of that. But I will wonder, and I'm giving you that vulnerability before what should happens happens. And I won't ever stop wondering, but I also know that I couldn't have it at any time in my life specifically. Especially now.

I'm not sure if this is making the sense that I needed to, but I do need you to know that I brought the keys back with me for a reason. If you knock on my door, I can't promise anything other than the fact that it's yours for the next couple of days for as long as you want it. And it's better that you don't want it for too long, and I'm hoping you'll recognize that.

I'm going to trust that you know me well enough on an emotionally intelligence level and why I'm doing this and why I went through it in my head what I did, which took an impressive amount of self-control and why I'm doing it the way I did now, and why it's for the best. And I hope you can understand me for it. And I hope you can understand that I still love you. Which I know it's never going to be enough in regards to whatever I've been taught love should be, and I know that's completely meaningless and empty coming from me for reasons I can't control, because I can never back up on anything meaningful for anything worthwhile that I've ever said. But it feels good to say. It's always felt good to say when it comes to you.

So just take care of yourself, and I'll try to do the best to take care of myself for me for as long as I'm able to.

I don't really understand what it feels like to be able to stick around with somebody because it's never made any sense to me. All I know is choppy and temporary, and at this age almost every given grown person would agree with me that it's too late for that to change now. As much as they love me, and I was never able to find anybody that I tolerated enough to be able to get anybody to want to make it work, and even if I do-exactly what is happening here tonight is. Part of me is dreading the worst with suffering for the both of us long term because of this decision I'm making, and another part of me is hoping that you will realize that this is like a lot of things were the dread os it happening is far worse than just the idea of it. Above all else, I want you to feel like you're in control of the situation, and to have the good energy to have a faith in the worth of your energy.

If I could have ever believed I had too much going on for me to get involved with any woman, you were the one exception to that, despite all the logical and finical reasons as to why that dosen't make sense. You drew me in in a way I crave where I don't even perceive myself, my temptations, my wants or desires or who I am or who other woman are or their status. When I feel the emotional intelligence of what you are, it sweeps me away in a way that I can't hope to ignore, and I just want you to know that I always did more than ever just tolerate you if you make the decision in th near future that I hope you'll make. You're more emotionally intelligent than any person I've ever known, so I'm not too worried.

Don't worry about me, anyway. I'm not going to lie to you about my wellbeing, and after this fling that felt more worthwhile than anyone I've ever had despite being immeasurably shorter, I don't know if I'll see the point again in anything for a long time. But I was getting ready to meet the ghosts of the dead energy of past people that were, in a lot of ways, the only people that even felt like people to me, and no matter how dead or faithless or flawed I felt inside of me doing it, I felt that the void and black was all that made sense. I couldn't get into the rhythm of life, or the rhythm of anything, like you did so easily for me. I couldn't get into the rhythm of anything. I couldn't believe anything, because the world told me I shouldn't-the flawed, blind, stupid and wisdom deprived world that I let string me like a puppet my entire life. I regret that, but with you the regret had a purpose and understanding, and caring myself every day has a thread of making sense no matter how imperfect it is where there used to be only a chaotic void to let the world in.

But every day now feels a little bit different. I don't think I'm ever going to change, and I won't ever be anything other than the damaged man you've known and saw and felt tonight, and the reality is that that is all most people ever are, are these damaged loathsome, unremarkable and sad things, and I am sorry that I can't give you the stoic sense of belonging in the replacement of your nonconsensual aimless freedom that you want and deserve. From my own end, I'm sitting on my own attempt of anything that makes any sense unless it eats me alive-the 'it' beng something indescribable, amd every single day makes me fall off just a little into that complete exhaustion to the point where I don't know how whatever it is I'm mad of physically doesn't give out- but I definitely do try. And I know you try to do the best you could for me too. Thank you for that. And I don't know how much longer I'll be able to keep trying, but you make me feel the slightest sense of an individual trail of starting, even if all we ever are longterm to one another, or as a whole, is a bitter memory to some, and eventually, not even that, and that I couldn't even give you that peace of light when you were here.

You were right. I was in a lot of pain today. You were right when you said it seemed as if I wasn't present today. It's probably better that I stop before I put you in even more

I'll think of you a lot-unless you don't want me to. You bring me a peace that is indescribable that makes everything feel

There were a couple of blotches from the whiskey stains on the letter, along with that seemed like vague blood or a splot of something similar-either way, it spoke of a messy scrawling from an erratic and wounded body with an even more sickly mind following.

at peace. And I can't explain how much that means to me. To make it make sense. I could never get any griphold on the chaos inside of me because it always seemed like the chaos itself was defying anything that could make it molded-but you managed that. You don't feel like a memory of a nightmare of people I would feel dreaded to even know me again if they saw me with their judgment, and disapproval, and disgusting sickly acts projected onto me that makes everything that I do and am feel wrong no matter what.

Tracking back, I will think of you a lot. Unless you are somehow aware of that might affected your emotional state in my absence-In which case, I won't think of you at all. Or you can pretend as if I don't. It should be easy, given how tragically easy woman fall into the background once they're done being present in my life- and as long as you are where you're at in life and you don't have sick media only accessed by sick people who do sick things to access it, I know you'll reach clarity eventually.

Whatever narrative makes you comfortable. That's just what I want for you. For you to be comfortable. Like what you gave me. And that's all there really is to say. And I guess that's all there ever will be to say.

Bojack

OOOOOOO

You didn't process going to the back of the computer to call Princess Caroline again to help you get home, nor did you process when she didn't answer and you instead got a large thrill of an indifferent phone call that spoke of the definition of indifference and annoyance even in her recorded absence.

Just as, in the middle of your foggy and dissociated indifference to what was physically happening around you, you began to dial for a taxi that would guide you home as your fingertips thumbed the side of the money next to your pocket when you remembered Bojack had handed it to you earlier that day; he must have known to some extent that there was a guarantee this would happen, you turned your head over to where there was now only the stagance of the yellow light of the museum left on, and the buzzing coming from the rest of the same electric functions that made up the museum, did you place the phone down just as the service man answered for the other end with a causal answer.

With your hand crumpled around the wrinkled, cramped and crushed paper had you eased yourself off of the edge of the desk, walking your way around it as you began to walk your way down the hallway, feeling the fresh chill of the breeze that seemed like a challenge and yet held that same melancholic air and artistry of medication that overtook you just from taking it in, as that natural peace Bojack had described overtook you just for taking in life scenarios the past few days together, ascribing them to a new meaning entirely. Though souls as tormented as the bot of yours and the both of you far too aware of the inevitable end, the two of you, regardless, had dressed up a new kind of wisdom as to how the both of you navigated life, which the both of you were insightful enough to realize lead to a terrible and pathetic end or in some horrifying way no matter what path was took-so that artistic and devastating madness was all there was.

You stepped your way out through the archway, head tilted up while you felt the fresh breeze snapping across your face as you eased your body out, taking in the fresh and natural organic freedom that came along with living with so little-ironically a kind of freedom that was deprived from playing games that were promised to the sickly. You turned your head down the quiet streets of Los Angeles as you felt the sharp breeze pick up while it threaded through your hear as you stepped bare feet-the shoes Bojack had tentatively picked out for you had been rubbing behind your heels, and you knew it didn't matter now, as you stepped down the cracked white stairs from the entrance. You turned your head down the now quiet street, now that curated cursitory was gone for the comfortable who could afford to have bland and mostly fakey constructed answers to curiosity in incredibly in dense and balanced, foggy headed scheduled hours, with their lack of nuance or creativity gone as quickly as much as the mold of what was made to appease it was; and the wonder of the night was yours.

Loving Bojack was an empty wonder, with only hypothetical reward rather than one that was of tangible reality, and required more faith than you had the strength to believe. It was just as the journey with finding faith and happiness for yourself was; constantly empty and defied and denied, and yet all you could do was to find that inner leverage to convince yourself, and in your especially enduring and lucky spirit, feel the happiness that you had no reason to feel; and felt anyway, even as everyone in far more fortunate circumstances were far more miserable and cynical and abusive towards people like yourself; but as the quiet secret you had come to learn was teaching you, the rules of the spirit didn't follow that of the constructed flawed mind of the humanity that had created the world.

Your skin was pale and sickly, your mind fogged with doubt and that usual dry reminder that connection would always be deprived and few and far between, and the empty sickness that followed as it it was a spiritual disease that you knew you couldn't change, you at least had the spiritual wisdom to endure it. As your feet was placed back on the cracked road that had countless memories of doing much of the same of the unremarkable and inhuman days that leeched from one day and into another in a blur of dry and gritty attempt at survival, you could already feel the memories pouring back in as your body remembered physically all of the sickness that had taken it to survive those nights and days of the same physical memory, and no new context could change the baggage of that.

But as your eyes turned up and threaded past the Los Angeles buildings, clustered and quiet and empty in their incurious abodement of people who had never been in circumstances where they had been forced to invent their wonder and survival of invention at every hour and as a result had suffocated their own soul's potential, you began to be reminded of the constant resurgence of the strength of that faith and reinvention again. Bojack's house was peeking out and over through the front of the rest of the street from the overpass of the city that was clustered against one another from the closed stores to the gradual hill that could be seen that represented Beverly Hills, foggy and barely seen through the blue of the night that surrounded the stack of the height of the hill, the various warm lights from the buildings from it stacked onto the side of the hill that spoke of the various isolated mansions; and it was as isolated and as chilling as much as it spoke from the way it was above the rest of the houses, and you felt a reaffirmation of your own freedom and call to it as you stepped you way down the cracked and abandoned street that symbolized all of the complacent and utterly chained routine of the miserable soulless people.

As you began to walk your feet down onto the cold pavement with the cracks of the pavement and the forgotten pollution on the road, you began to feel a certain kind of free headedness come over you that previously had been fogged over from the moronic distraction of the people who chained themselves with their own lack of wisdom before in the museum of the cut throat and tight suits and of the people who moved according to their training rather than truth. The fog began to melt away as you walked your way down the path, untethered to anything or of any routine or of a specific expectation and taking the whim of the natural wisdom of the world along with you-something that more often than not was devastating at its core, but even in its worse moments had there always been a small part of you that had understood.

You didn't bring it upon yourself to care, either, about the jaded comment that was made by one of the few people that were out as they cluttered the broken down and shattered street; stoners, both of them dressed in that sullen and indifferent and torn fashion of their clothes and rot while their arms were lazily slung onto the car beside them that was stepped on the end of the street just a little away from where the museum and the slightly more business side of the street had been a moment ago; not giving away to small and more gritty alleyways that made plenty of room for humor invention, but only of the dark and destruct kind; for most after a certain age, the only curiosity any possessed left that still had energy. The two men talked to one another lowly and with their own muttered and darkly laced cackling, and you tensed as you heard even in their tone how they had lost any clarity in themselves, senses the rot even just from the low chuckling of their tones. You had long since gotten used to the verge of the edge of danger, and if nothing else, just as you had come to survive every extent of suffering in the world as it gave you something that seemed made only for destruction, you gave yourself the wisdom of the gratitude that you had the certain character and gift of energy that came from being able to be surrounded by danger in the first place and to know the lessons that came along with it; to have a chance to be alive in the first place, to know what it felt likt to protect.

One of the stoners turned as he gleamed his sloppy and curved rasied mouth over the side of his lip as his head turned over to you with a lazy turn of his shoulder and a raise of a lazy lip, amusment sickly and deprived of anything pure or of even knowing what that meant as his lip was ghosted with amusement that spoke of that destructive and sickly flattery you knew all too well, and though the blurriness of your increased sense of lack of being able to stay entirely in the moment as it came with disassociated and blurred moments such as that, you could somehow still catch the sleaziness of his grin as he raised his dirty brow.

Your head turned down as you rushed your way down the street, hearing a vague quick call to a whistle that you knew to some extent must have been catcalling; but the tools if your sickness clad you in remembrance, and you continued to rush your way down the street, head turned down, and falling into faith as you kept you eyes turned up to the melancholy of that isolated building drenched in pain and had the most surreal and worthwhile human beauty in it, and with your observation of that and the remembrance of that small sliver of something that seemed human did you continue to rush your way down the street, remembering not for the countless time that life was inherently meant to be exhausting and disorienting; a constant reinvention, and that it was all there was except to go along with it until something gave out.

You made your way beside one of the parked cars that was sat on the side of the street as you paused for a quick moment and kept your hand placed on the side of it, turning your head over your shoulder as you looked over to where the men were already pressed beside the car against them as they kept turning their heads over their shoulder and offering you that grimy call, though already did it seem as if they were losing interest, and the grim of their own low quality was already falling into residue of the murky fog the inquality and sickly in spirit left behind; you certainly had come to know it plenty of times yourself through almost every given moment of your days.

You pressed your body firmly against the front of the metal as you felt its cool touch beside your back, and slowly did their car come to a rumble as their teasing and jabbing began to fade into the dusk surrounding them within the night, clamoring into their car as the white light of it was snapped on and began to flood through the street. Your head turned to the side as you gave a silent prayer, then turned your eyes back up to the meleolnony of the house in front of you.

Your hands came to press beside your arms as you walked your way down the street with an increased fast pace, eyes turning up to the house that peaked through the foggy clouds of the air that made up the foggy extent of the clouds and chill of the night.

Your feet tripped as you walked your way through the crack of the old road, hitching your breath now and then as you tried to focus on getting to the extent of the large mansion while it heeded over and stacked on the hills. Your mind was foggy, your focus disoriented as you continued to walk through the compact stacked houses that were passing by the side of your blurred vision, decreasing from being the stacked and closed in stores and gradually giving away to the much more spaced out houses beside each other while you continued to walk up and over the gradual turning up of the hill. The atmosphere began to become more intentional with specific green gardens and the soft yellow turn of the lights that sat in front of the houses beside the front and side of the buildings that were spaced out and even from the entrance of the path and dressed up in the empty void of the front yards, threading through the spaces of the green pastures that spoke of high and intentional high class that was now spacing even further from the front of the open paved path.

Your sense of reality was decreasing as you walked your way up the street and felt the path of the road walking and easing forward to the gradual upheaval of the hill, the fogginess and emotional detriment of your longing fogging around you, right along with your senses. You had lost your sense of reality before; through the long and indifferent and barely responsive atmosphere that came along with the city and the natural world, it had always been inevitable that you would feel at times as if you sense of reality, the concept of time, the understanding of your body and how it related to the natural world would begin to turn from the inside out with disorientation-and somewhere in the emotional black of emotional exhaustion that was nothing but bad and the constant empty stagnant of suffering you had long since lost the ability to see the end to, there had been the occasional dry extent of the light of hope in the corner of your perception of your mind that had offered small tricks of the occasional dry and dusted light; exhausted and disoriented in how it came to your perception, and yet just enough of a light that it had been enough for you to feel human, at least for the time that the idea of the dry hope gave you.

You were beginning to hear that soft voice that was full of far more emotional intelligence that he gave himself credit for the in the ease of his years, knowing that, whether he had a lot to say about it or not, h e had an artistic insight inside of a part of him that allowed himself to see a truth and irreparable insight to everything for what it was; in the tone of how he spoke in that dry and reflective reality of his voice had he allowed you to tear open and pull back to what was your understanding that even for your severe depression in your life and nothing but the mundanity of the indifference as the days had gone on around you, and to see that there was something of an inherent insight to how you were that would have always taken you back to your humanity eventually, in the sense that it was as apart of you as much as the functionality of your body and of your skin, and leaving it behind was a promise of an unfathomable degree of impossibility, and he had been the most graceful stoic message of such. It was a bittersweet reminder; most of your days had passed in a mundane and an unsolvable pain, and the days were wasted along with the grief of the overall expanse of your life, but the inevitably of your humanity and of the most compelling worthwhile pain coming from even the most inhuman experience, where every noise was an extension of inhuman hell and ever experience a sign of a life taken to despair beyond help, was one that for once, where there used to be doubt, but now an indescribable extension of your own surreal taking of understanding that it was something that could never be lost.

You could see that beauty of him, in the specific fashion that he was made for you to see it, and made more so because of the extension of your pain and the dry exhaust of despair. It was a specific rhythm as beautiful as much as how you could see the turning over of the void of the sky in front of you while you saw the orange sweep through the dark sky of the night blue in its surrerality, the passing over of the days of the two weeks that were now spinning themselves into a portrait of how the days had sound together in their own blessing over through the front of the building as the days and time had gone passed, and in those days of healing with his company had you found that being alone had been more an unharmful beast rather than something that was to be mourned; a simplicity of life, until he came in and filled in the time again with his presence that made everything seem all the more natural.

You had memories how he had looked at you through the front of the entrance of the bedroom when you were both done making love for the night, his eyelids lowered and hooded but dim in that emotionally somber apprecation as he had watched you raise yourself up from the sweating of the sheets while you had curled your body forward, leaning yourself up as you had taken to meeting the soft eternal extension of his eyes while sweating skin and the entanglement of the sheets had caused you to wake yourself up in the middle of the night while you tried to pierce together one of the countless experiences you had had that you were still coming to terms with even existed.

The beauty of the multicolor and surreal turning over of the sky as it sat above the building while you walked your way under the looming of his house continued while the colors of the complexity of the day turned as each one represented the undertaking of the phase of each day and emotion the color of it had attached to you. The surreal turning over of the sky paused back into its cloudy bleakness as you walked your way under the building as it loomed over you where it had been stacked against the rocks. In the muddle of the purple and peak of the clouds and sky did it remind you when Bojack made love to you in the middle of the night, and through quick rasps and jolts of his breath and the confliction of his breathing had you taking in the fact that he himself was trembling under the weight of the meaning of the both of you, the physical hitch of hs breath and his fight to believe that he could be loved, and the wreckage of the weight of that struggling towards acceptance that came along with the complexity and finite processing of the human that made existence plenty busy and compact, and you had physically felt the way his body had trembled and turned under your hands as the slick of his skin and stout body trembled beside yours.

It wasn't hard, to love and to take risk; the human mind and body was already so limited anyway, and in that sense was there always the guarantee that everything would eventually settle into dust of the natural finite ways of the human mind and body not matter what chances were taken, but it certainly had felt too much to bear on nights like that. There was a physical weight to the way Bojack trembled under the knowledge of it, and the hitch of his troubled rasped breath had given him away as he had kept his snout touched by your forehead drenched in your own same knowing.

You would rub your hands around the side of his mane while you had felt natural words of comfort leave your lips as you muttered your promises to him, and Bojack's teeth would poke as he leaned his forehead forward and pressed it beside yours, your fingertips threading beside the up trail of his disheveled mane, allowing your hands to caress against all side of his neck and shoulders and down to the lovehandles of his plush hips while they had hovered over your body. It had been the pinnacle of what you had shared together; where emotional wound and physical was turning into the complexity of agreement of the simplity that the both of you were seen and loved for it in full intimacy, and within that was there a peaceful contentment where previously there had only been a chasing or worry about things as they were.

His plush body had settled against your hips as he had given another hiccup of a hitch of his breath, and you had felt the weight of your body as he had trembled his weight beside your hips. The surrerality of the night was, no doubt, executed even further because of your love and bondage for him as he had settled against your torso, giving a release of a hitch of a breath as plush curve of his body settled beside your own.

When the weight of that had calmed down, he had rested his round and curved cheek beside your chest, granting you a new dad joke every couple of minutes, your fingertips trailing down his mane as you had done so, and small chuckles and murmurs of agreement threading beside the both of you in the still dryness of the air. Bojack was more depressed around you rather than less; and it held that beautiful sense of a reward that came along with that vulnerability when it was in the right perception of the person, such as you were. The house had been something that was full of nothing but pain, both with what lead him there and long after, and he had spent all his decades attempting to ignore it; it wasn't until he had began to fully sink and feel it in all of its devesting detriment that he had begun to accept the pain and the narrative inside of it and long before that he was beginning to find peace.

Your breath hitched as you felt your feet continue to scrap on the road while you made your way to the looming golden gate that towered in front of you, your head turning forward as you looked over at the golden gate beside you, cursive in what was no doubt a bloated and content day for Bojack when he had made it for the sake of proving he had worth and beyond to escape the pain of being nothing. Your head turned down to your pocket as your fingertips trembled while you gripped your hands onto the metal keys Bojakc had given you, threading it onto your hands as you felt the metal flip between your fingertips as you managed to fight through the memories and the surrerality of the richness the turning over of the sky gave you while you walked your way over to the gate, stepping your way over to the hole as you took to trembling your hands into the small hole. With one click, the gate gradually began to open, and with a creak you winced as you turned your head up to the passing over gate, and then slipped the key in your pocket as you began to walk your way into the large driveway in front of you.

Even through the memories with each passing patch of the sky as it passed and started to turn in its colors of the days again in front of your eyes while you walked down the driveway and over to the front of the door, you could feel the memories of how the both of you were clearly and rapidly messy within how you came to untangle and attempt to see one another, even though spiritually the both of you had an incessant agreement there was a warmth to it that was beyond understanding and even more of a pure sentiment that simple contentment of action; and that had been the main thing to get the both of you through the detriment of your emotional and physical torment and the strain of doubt that came along with action.

But there had been a part of you that had intertwined with something that made sense even on a technical level, just as you felt now while the electric of the gate gradually began to ease open from the trigger of the keys, and just as you walked forward with a sense of faith as your arms wrapped beside your chest even as you had come to the acceptance and conclusion that Bojack was leaving you to comfortable abandonment until you gave in. There was a sense of something that seemed bent on guarantee even as it wasn't; something that seemed like it was an inherent understanding between the both of you even as it was attempted to be disregarded by the both of you, and you complacent in it.

The memory of his rasped toned whiskey breath, the feeling of the warmth and plush curve of his stomach around the side of the trembling concave curve of your pale torso while it had leaned back beside the wall as Bojack had made love to you, against the side of the gray wall that sat next to the window while the light streamed in front he neon light of the city and the moon when lucky as, for a little while, the frustration and the inherent tragedy of being human in response to existence had come to an exhaust for a little while, where spiritual was as tangible as any physical relief.

You were making your way over to the front door now as you played with the keys with one hand, calm enough now to accept that you and Bojack were doing with one another, what he was doing with you, to no longer have any sense of nervousness or rejection of it. At least half the people that were driving by the street in front of Bojack were driving with the same fancy extent of the cars that had been beside the event earlier that day; dressed in the same glistened end of their comfortability and the stagance of having enough luxury to never have to know too much about their own nature, and you felt yourself turning over your shoulder to catch a glimpse of them, one lizard woman turned with her head eased back in the middle of a laughter that was executing through the open window and her lips supple into a fattened pulp of her own contentment of her selfishness; and the world was just as much so to not even see it as such. Your head watched as you saw the energy of that same extent of something the majority were rejection from, and yet as you took in the selfishness that was detrimental normalized, you felt it wasn't as much of a loss for you as much as it was for the people drenched within it.

You knew how things worked when it came to human psychology; how there was a natural something of desperation that you needed to find with every passing hour of your emotional journey that you wouldn't cease trying to find until you did. As you turned and eased your hand on the front of the gray door in front of your hand and eased it open with a grunt of your hand and a tug, and began to feel that familiar sense of something that was a troubled fog of contentment that came along with a lack of the simplicity and tragedy of failing to live a life, you felt your own odd contentment and sense of home be met for a moment.

Bojack's messy, puffy eyed, exhausted and dim eyed appearance, mane erratically spewed out in front of him as he had greeted you with every disgruntled and troubled night; and yet it was seeing and being within his pain in the middle of the night that had caused more depth and introduction to you both that was rich with the splendor of all humanity wanted of emotional intimacy. As you had leaned forward, the both of you too wretched and exhausted to even begin to understand how you could do anything other than to take it slow and at an ease, Bojack's torment far too complicated to have any sense be made of it except to simply take it and understand it with all the slow rhythm that came along with doing so, you had rubbed his cheeks, and the understanding that something worthwhile and human had been achieved overnight had come to full agreement as his lip had raised up in a small gratitude of a fashion.

Your pale hand came to rest beside your arm as you pressed your hand beside it while you stepped in, your other heel coming to kick it closed as you walked your way into the living room. You could feel the ghost of the warm pale of his hands on the front of your skin now, and no matter how much you pressed your fingers onto your skin to bring you to reality of his intentional absence, you knew it wouldn't work. The feeling certainly wasn't going to go away, and it certainly didn't have any apology for it, either. You could feel a vague echo of a memory of when Bojack had woken up screaming and withered in his rasped disgruntlement of his trouble in the middle of the night while his body had treamord in a fight, the muscles on hs face paralyzed and frozen as he wrestled under the sheets, and whatever ideas you had put in his head for the day, they had succumbed under the bleak black of his thoughts of processing. You could feel the echo of the depth of his torment now as you walked your way down the living room, balancing the keys between your fingertips until you were beside the counter and could throw them to the side with a clang onto the counter.

The world began to blur as you began to take in the full isolation of the house and of the reality of it now, and part of you briefly wondered if you had always been worthless for this to be considered beyond something deserved, or if it was a narrative conditioned inside of your that had caused to see what would have been an otherwise decet self esteem into something wretched and loathed. Either way, Bojack had given you the house for as long as you wanted for the sake of his own desperate attempt at comfortability, and you had to deal with the heaviness of the residue of a leftover tormented soul until he changed his mind.

The house phone was sat a little bit aways from the sink. You knew that Bojack more than likely had kept his cell phone with him, and you could call him, or at least attempt, whenever you felt you indeed. But you felt you didn't bother wanting to tell him where you were going; which was nowhere, and he would eventually soon enough have to figure out for himself what that meant.

A strange heartache that could only come from something as real as what you shared overwhelmed you as you kicked your way through the bedroom door, turning your head to where you made your way over to Bojack's large square window as you watched the undertaking of the city under the sky as the world went by, and you felt your eyes turn over the lights of it, as if you have been physically branded to the emotional mark you now had overlooking the city that had more depth and meaning to you now than you knew could ever be deserved for anyone; only granted. The turning over of the sky and its multi-colors that represented the days of which you had shared with Bojack that had held more life and meaning to them than you had ever had in your life, and the possible knowing you ever would in the future, overcame you as you watched the bittersweet overpass of the neon orange sky begin wot fade from the quiet lightshow of the surrerality as it passed by and over the buildings.

You closed your eyes as you gave a shaky breath. Four walls, multiple of them, several stories with more livable resources than you could ever even hope to keep up with, and you had never felt as if there was a bigger extension of a challenge that you didn't know you could face. The tension of the emotional and tragic beauty of the house and the love you endeared to the one who bore it called to you too intensely; it was too much of a strain, and it felt like both the end and the beginning of everything you had ever known.

The muscles on your face treamored as you heard that soft and masculine raspy voice you know for a fact was never going to leave you alone in the memory of that house that was dressed with everything he was even in his muddled torment that only called and drew you further into everything that had dressed the long and tormented narrative of that house. You knew that to get through the most challenging and the most harrowing moments of your life alone would be rewarding long term; that was the inner joy you felt after the black moods of the headspaces you had to endure, but this one had something especially grating to it, and you knew you couldn't be lack to follow its emptiness. Life had been forgiving in a sense before; it had been only about robotic survival and little to do with anything the poisoned people of the world did and paid for that they were convinced they had to when you had a fresh perspective on what that was daily and how untrue that was.

With the depth of emotion now, nothing was promised or even made sense, especially when it came to something being an ease. Your eyes blinked frantically, rapidly as you tried to blink the emotion out of your eyes as you turned your focus over to the bed beside you, placed and made together due to Bojack's use as a distraction earlier when he would have done anything other than to have hid timid and distracted eyes turn away from you, and when you had stood by the bed and had tossed your hand by the sheets for the occasional much of the same excuse, though you had also done it in the undeniable sense that you wanted to offer him love, even if he only did it out of the only thing he did; emotional bewilderment and fear.

To even think that now, the action of how you had both focused on the action of it with the same uncertain restlessness had felt beautiful but at the same time most unapologetically layered in the haunting it was offering you in the back of your head. You don't know why you were being so suffocated emotionally by somebody that had clearly never aligned himself to believe in whatever little philosophy that he could have come up with for clarity of survival every day; and even you had managed that in the lost aimlessness of your existence. Bojack was pathetic and detached and sloppy, both physically and mentally, if only for the fact that he had drenched himself into denial ans escapism for decades rather than taking his emotional life, physical life, and everything he was made of in all of his purpose head on, and had instead been punished in his complacent for the soothing but sloppy laziness known as his own escapism through his usage. The absence of him would be grabbing his hands and demanding your thoughts on his absence come all moments here after.

But you walked your way over to the side of the bed as you sat yourself down on the small corner of peace the both of you had granted one another for at least that small section of your lives, and your hand passed itself beside the gray sheet as you felt it smooth over your palm. The warmth of your eyes turned as you looked over the bed while you began to settle for resting your hips beside it, turning your body to lie down the space where his plush form had been the same place where he had rolled and muttered to himself in his troubled exhaust as you had taken to holding him. There was the understanding you had made with yourself a long time ago that as long as your body was still physically functional, your mind was nothing but nonexistent and petty emotions attempting to torment you, and you would simply keep functioning until they ceased, just as you came to rest your embrace beside Bojack despite the troubled nature of his permanently pained mind; and yet in the pain was there all the reason for that true and bonding beauty between the both of you that came along with truly seeing and bonding with one another in all of your true and undeniable humanity without shame.

Even though he had spoke against the very second got the chance, it was those small moments that seemed to be the only thing that he truly believed in at the end of every long and trying day to save his own life; and though his seeming indifference and his lack of zest towards his life and will to suicide had been one that was indeniable, he had still shown a clear air of will of endurance.

As your body began to lie itself down and onto the mattress while you curled your body against the gray sheets Bojack should have taken that night, you found they were too clean for comfort, missing his earthly feel and that brawny and exhausted worn face that was caused by being apart of the world and the constant tormented extent of its malicious flaws; the naturally overtly comfortable and molded plush curve of his body, arms, love handles and stomach that spoke of a tubby and comfortable lovability dressed in torment; a complacent and foggy pained combination fo someone who had all the deep conflict that came along with the comfortability of denial and the torment of the mind, rendering his pain to be even further unseen, and yet you had never known someone so endearingly lovable and so clear in his humble humanity, and the desire to love him was beyond what you could comprehend, only take it in its unfathomable struggle and nature of how everything he was was loved and intertwined to you in a maddening want of desirability of love.

Your head lied onto the pillow, white and plushed out, and at least that had the extent of some of the trails of Bojack's earthly and deep toned scent to it along with the senses of his cigarette smell and his brawny skin. As your hands came to ease beside the grey sheet while you pulled it over to your chest and turned to the window, the narrative of feeling as if nothing would ever be enough began to now fully leer its face towards you, invisible and demanding and promised in its presence. And you didn't know what you would do with the now sweaty and torn crumpled letter that was in your palm grazing around your fingertips with a certain kind of darkness of thought around the edge of the paper while you felt the crumpled dampness of it polluted with the both of your messy humanity against the paper that was now marked and drenched in it.

But, just as the heavy eyed and blackened mane that seemed as if it was possessed by his own sort of wisdom and narrative of the world that would never been seen by anyone in the middle of his beauty and response to the world, such as it was with almost everyone, if not everyone, Bojack had a certain personal wisdom and a niche life to him not entirely understood even by yourself, and you came to realize now it was more than likely for the best. You didn't believe it-but he did, and for as long as he did, you knew that you had no choice but to try to and believe it for yourself.

After all, you have never been very good at trying to take care of somebody without becoming lost inside of who they were-and it certainly wasn't as if you even knew what love or even care was yourself; everything had either been a maddening isolation of indifference from the world, or it had been a transaction-and a sickly one at that. Bojack was emotionally wise enough that maybe his loathing and refusal wasn't just about you bur rather as to what he saw you as; and you were finding that there was no choice but to understand that there was a wretchedness to you that showed itself from the inside out, whether you admitted it or not; a sickness beyond anything that could be conveyed as deianal or something even tolerable, not matter the emotional wisedom you attempted to execute towards Bojack or even for yourself, there was no denying the predctiable and soulless nothing you were in your common unremarkability at your core.

Your eyes closed as you began to feel the heat of your skin flash while the bottom of your lip tremebeld as you curled further into what would be the emptiness of the wait game for the upcoming days, the grey sheets curled around your shoulders as you eased yourself further against the softness, and you felt the verge of black of mind and the wet of eyes begin to greet the murky processing of the unconsciousness.

But as you body began to turn to a troubled and conflicted sleep, your eyes blearily opened now and then in the middle of the process of finding contentment with the gift of Bojack's ghastly shadow of his existence left behind by the mattress. Your eye caught the skyline of the buildings as they eased beside the night of the blue pollution of the sky, and though the surrerality of the color was gone, you caught a small cut of a line of neon and white light poking through what was otherwise the mundanity and acceptance of light pollution by the skyline; a small beautiful hint of something that seemed as if it were in agreement of the niche beauty that you had Bojack had found, and through the small peak of the light did you feel both a fear and an inspiration overcome you, and you found yourself not questioning the sense of the peeking surreality of it, just as you had stopped questioning much of anything since you had fallen into the spiritual blessing known as awakening madness in a soulless and mundane world, where reaching for the remarkable felt sickly, even as it was all anyone craved and suffered for without.

As your body shrugged against the mattress, you felt an unforgivable sense of that same burning that came from far more than just heartache-everything had been levitated into something beyond the normal and expected into further complexity and height through Bojack, a new sense of reality that was overpassing you along with it.

You would have loved to believe the narrative that what you shared was, in fact, the only thing that could have saved him. Not because you wanted there to be lesser numbers of solutions, but because you knew that was the reality of things, and you had no interest in denying reality; as truth had the most rewarding allure to it, terrible and as unforgiving as it could be. There were multiple truths and different nuances of perspectives that were being opened up to the both of you the more that the both of you spent time together, and it was impossible to ignore the power of them, disorienting and as fogged under the problems of day to day humanity as they could be. You want to run with them, to find him along with them, to find that new sense of nuanced reality that was opening through the tear of his torment and the complication that made up the ways of life and the constant demand and challenge of it.

You would stay here, you decided, as you turned the side of your face further into the pillow, huddling the blanket further around your body and shoulders while you breathed the scent of Bojack in. You would stay here, even after Bojack cracked and came back to his home when he assumed your patience had long since waned and he came back here and assumed you left in his cynical predictability of how quickly others left and gave up on each other. Even if he met you with defiance and anger within his disbelief when he saw you, you would still take it upon yourself to do so; and even if he met you with anger, you would still stay within your truth until the both of you came together into an agreement of understanding that it was opposing truths that had made you as you were to begin with and that indefinable remarkability the both of you felt when they intermelded.

You would wait for anything to see those puffy eyed and childish cocky expression and the splay of his mane when he knocked on the door; to hear that raspy soothing voice again as he stepped his way inside at your greeting, foggy and muggled and chuckling lowly as he clumsily stepped in when he, no doubt, came from the chaos of wherever it was he had been to try and discourage himself from his distractions and the cowardliness behind them of what he couldn't face of what was so clearly demanding between the two of you.

You fell into a sleep that was muddled in emptiness and bewilderment, feeling the certain emptiness of a loneliness that seemed curated only for you to experience in its full hellish depth, and your sleep felt more like a muggy black fog turning in front of your eyes more than it was of anything that could be understood or offered life ir even the distraction of dreams. In the middle of the night, late enough that there was still no sign of the slight sign of a sunset orange turning over the buildings to peek over to a new day, you got yourself up in the middle of the night, taking your hand against the gray sheets that now smelled more like you than Bojack as you tripped yourself over the blanket in the middle of the house that wasn't dark at all, with the compliment of the neon pool and the lights of Los Angeles blaring enough that even on the isolated hilltop, they were plenty of a demand of glare into the house.

You let out a breath of relief when you walked into the small washer room, where you heard the quiet tumbling of what would be the sheets and clothes that came from the inside of the dryer if it were turned on; nothing but a quiet hum from the machines for now, waiting to be turned on. Some of the clothes were tossed on top of the dryer, sloppy and folded in a casual way that spoke of a grumpy toss of a casual disinterest from Bojack's end as he had thrown it over the washer; some of them were folded with a very specific intention, and those sat onto of the washer. The majority of them were various colorful sweaters; as you walked over and peered over the white of the box of the washer, you noticed several of them bore the brand of the television show that had shot him into notable success.

You stepped your way up on your tip toes as you leaned your hand over the washer, taking your hand onto the nearest sweater as your han trembled on top of it. You felt the warmth come over you as you felt the fresh cleanliness of the sweater as it met your hands while your hand curled and gripped onto the sweater and began to pull it from the top of the washer, your eyes turning over it in your content of warmth as you looked over the blocked leathers that were dancing in their brand of Horsin' Around on the front of the neon yellow of the sweater.

You pulled it over your head as you felt the warmth and soft fuzz of the material wrap around your body, and you gave a shaky breath of relief as you turned your head down and swept your hands onto the side of your arms, feeling Bojack's conflicted but full air of his life come over you as you eased your hands onto your arms and rubbed the soft material against your body. It didn't smell like him in his humbly human and flawed fashion; but it did smell clean, and it reminded you of the surprising traits Bojack threw you now and then. He could be clean and organized and adorably domestic-if he had only ever had the reason of being so to begin with.

You would take whatever you could get of him while you could; no matter how flimsy or what kind of superficial extent of the small hints of the uncovering of his soul you could get while you waited for things to curve and break. You didn't care about any kind of progressive narrative about how you should have loved him or how you should have loved yourself and in regards to it, you only cared about the fact that you knew that there was a secondary understanding of life and of what it meant that was wordless that followed no rules or even reason; it was a craving of something spiritual that no one ever acknowledged, as humanity was inherently cursed and denied itself that of which it needed an craved the most from itself. The tender somber look of that unhealthy, grounded and humble human expression was something that offered a soft radicalization even without knowing them at all. And for as long as that was true, you knew that you would lose yourself; if there ever even was anything to lose to begin with, or if you were only regaining, and especially in regards to something that could never be lost to begin with, but only relearned; especially when humanity seemed to have so little understanding of its own kind.

You shoved your way over from the front of the open dry room and stumbled your way down the kitchen, waling your way over to the bedroom door as you stepped your way inside, curling yourself back onto the mattress as you eased your body onto the gray lump of the bed while it greeted you in. To an extent you amused yourself with the idea that if he were here, he would have stop and watched you for a time while standing in the doorway, watching you with that hooded lidded eyes that spoke of a narrative of the rarity of a human soul, and the crushing weight that came along with obtaining it within the soulless; and with a few rasps and grumbles and without a word would be come by the edge of the bed and sit beside you, expression somber and dry eyes turning to you, until he curled himself beside you on the mattress, arms stretching forward and wrapping the chubby embrace of his arms beside your hips as he would pull you in, torment eased into the simple decision of one another for the time you both had the peace of rhythm, and a little wiser for living within the quiet answers of the real world for a time. In those moments, the both of you understood that your suffering had come from within, and that gratitude and living in the moment without doubt, of respect of the inner life, hard as it could be, was all there was.

Tonight, he wouldn't do the same, and you would be lying here alone, attempting to try and find that sense of impossible peace the same way you had your entire life, knowing it should have been the simpliet thing in the world and knowing that it was part of the indefinable impossibility of being human to find it. Among all else on that night, however, as you turned and gazed at the simplicity of the ongoing business of the city that went on without care or even knowledge of what felt like the cage of your inner mind, you were reminded of how humorously and how pathetic and freely small you were; a small game taking itself too seriously, unaware of how little it mattered, and the freedom of knowing you were delusional about your own power and importance of your life; and therefore overestimated the power of your pain.

Even if there was a chance you never heard the words you wanted to from Bojack said out loud and to you again, you found that at this point, your inner peace came from accepting yourself and finding peace within your own finite unremarkable existence and pain and finding a genuine world within it; the world was a mess anyway, and its flaws weren't your fault, and that Bojack would find a way to take care of himself in some way; and above all, that the both of you would find your wisdom of your peace.

After all, Bojack was wise, in his own broken and implosive way.

OOOOO

"Bojack?" The pink hand slammed on the front of the hotel door. It was gilded in gold in a way that served to be humorous in regards to how much Bojack had paid to be here. "Bojack-for the love of God, come out before my whiskers come off from the amount of stagnant nobodies in here and this disgusting dry and forgotten hallway. I can't take it. Let me in, for my sake, at least, and if you can't do that then at least for a pair of eyes to see the beautiful golden decor you dressed up so nicely for your pathetic crawl scheme away from something that actually matters. Please!"

Princess Caroline gave another abrupt and frantic knock on the front of the glistened door, her breath coming out shaky and her eyes wincing with how cold she had been rushing her way out of her car, body cramped and ached with how much she had sat in her vehicle while he continued to jam her hand on the door. She gave an abrupt hiss when there was no response from the door, and she snapped over her arm as she frantically hammed her hand on the door again, this time with more insistence.

"Bojack! I'm serious! You're taking the entire load and throwing it to the other side of the road and watching it implode!"

"You should be grateful I'm giving you this rare moment of stagance and boredom to the point where you're literally begging me to come entertain you. All your doing is showing off your lack of gratitude for the lack of crazy that could spurt up any moment. You're welcome."

"So you aren't black out and drunk and heaved over yourself in the hotel room that you're using to make fancy for the sake of trying to hide how pathetic this all is? Great. That's a good first step."

There was a soft low grumble that came from the other side of the door, the vague soft of a kicking against the bed as the movement of Bojackk began to ease himself up from the edge of the mattress; Princess Caroline assumed it was a mattress, if only from the weight of the sudden intense swear and the thud of it against the bed. She stepped back, arms crossed in front of her chest, her body turned into itself as she shivered from the leftover cold that came from behind outside as the expression of her face furrowed into a frown from the outside traffic and whip of the air.

"I wasn't thrilled about coming here. Or about the idea of getting caught up in another impulsive scheme of whatever you dragged someone into for the sake of pleasing yourself for a little while until you realize that's all bullshit as much as the next thing when your perspective changes after awhile-"

"-I wasn't thrilled about the idea of being approached by some aging old ex girlfriend to come and tell me something that I not only am not interested in hearing, but that I didn't ask for to begin with. It seems like we might have come to an agreement and understanding here."

Bojack's words were vaguely slurred, and Princess Caroline took to rolling her eyes up and felt the burning under her bags at the action even as she felt her wrinkles and expression deeping in its exhaust that she had made from her own attempt at a decent decision. Her eyes narrowed as she heard Bojack stumble over the other side of the door of what sounded like several different personal items he had thrown onto the ground that he was now taking to tripping over.

"What the hell amount of stuff did you need to take in order to already have that much accumulated from the amount of time that you've spent driving your way over here and deepening yourself into your overthinking? Hasn't it only been two or so hours since you left?"

"Once again, I wasn't aware I would be getting a review for something like this. I was under the impression that I was hiring you to drive her home and then would take the incredibly obvious common sense of going home to your own place and taking yourself in for the night and leaving me alone about it."

"Yeah. Because that's always worked out amazing. To allow you to sit and wallow and to be increasingly more unseen as a person with whoever does see you to begin with. That's the way to live an amazing life and to not end up turning out as miserable and as empty as much as you fear you'll be."

"What is your problem?"

Bojack's voice was edged in announce, but it was clearer now as Princess Caroline's pout turned to where she saw him handling the door, the sounds of him handling the door, the sounds of the clicks of metal that came from the hotel door. She stepped her way back delicately as she hard his various grumbles and breaths that came from the other end, until it a snap did it open upward, completle with Bojack peeking at her over through the dry exhaust and puffy black eyed extension of what seemed like pletnly of disgurntled unhappiness and disorientation from a mane that had cleary been messed with as he had played with in while pacing through the bedroom.

"Hey." His eyes winced as he looked her over. "It looks like you're going above and beyond tonight to try and help with something that should have ended about an hour or so by now. And you look about as bad for it as much as I didn't want you to do it."

"And you seem as grateful as much as the woman should have been for even having a chance at the life you offered to her tonight. The same way that you should be thinking over what you're doing." She stepped her way forward, but when Bojack didn't budget, but rather had his eyes widen as he looked at her with a slight edge that spoke of the idea that he wanted to be left alone, she paused. The emotion on her face fell as she spoke, with a little bit more earnesty; "Can I come in?"

"I'd prefer if you didn't." His troubled, dry eyes turned down as the expression on his face furrowed in thought, then managed a light shrug as he stepped back and indicated his head inside dryily. "But since you're not following the rules tonight,I already know how this dance goes anyway. We may as well make the most of it for while you're here and playing it."

"I did do what you asked me to do. That's actually part of the problem." Princess Caroline stepped her way past him, her arms still strained beside her chest as her green eyes slitted across the bedroom in thought. "Wooden walls and golden glided doors-and a television. Everything you need in order to distract yourself into a rot and rut until there's nothing left for you to return to." Her hand placed on her hip as she turned and gazed at him with a charismatic and edged cocky tease. "Everything down to a science, as always. I'm almost impressed."

"Loneliness hits in all different kind of ways according to the situation." Bojack's tone was somber, lacking humor and more of an even dry depth of how he spoke it as he shut the door in front of him, causing Princess Caroline's face to turn more earnest as she watched him walk past her, head tilted forward, expression heavy as he walked his way across the room with his eyes too troubled to acknowledge her; the floor was, just as it had sounded, littered with his clothes that had been thrown causally across the floor.

"I don't get it. Did you dump the entire damn thing out and onto the floor?"

"What? Your perception of my dignity? Because I know you'll do that for me."

"No." She winced in an empathic but disgusted manner as she gripped her hand beside one of Bojack's sweaters, shaking it as she did so. "The clothes. Is it really that hard for you to take the easy way out? What's the point of even taking it, then?"

"Why are you here?"

Bojack's voice was low in disgruntled exhaustion as he eased his plump body beside the corner of the bed, his dry and hooded eyes turning over to her as he placed his elbows beside his knees and gazed at her with what seemed like dry challenge; but mostly there was just an extent of exhaustion in his eyes that spoke that he didn't especially care for what happened anymore. Princess Caroline's eyes darted down as she placed the sweater back onto the floor, Bojack's eyes watching her in blank question; until his expression lowered into a further dry challenge of a mocking, crossing his arms in front of his chest. He was dressed in nothing but a robe eased around his shoulders, plush curve of his stomach turning out.

"You know your expression is as attractive as much as that belly hanging out? Did you manage to show her all of that, too, or is this something that's always just been for me?"

An entire abrupt insult and of Bojack's own harborded worn anger flew in his eyes and he winced with an even further violence, ears flown back as he scrunched into himself.

"How is this something that was worth coming over here for?"

Princess Caroline sighed while she kept her eyes turned down, her eyes easing down in the heaviness of her confliction. She stepped over the thrown clothes that was cluttering the floor, her mouth crameped into caution as she leaned her arms out in a comically degree of attempt of balance while she stumbled her way to the edge o the bed. But Bojack turned further into himself, her dry eyes watching her as she stumbled her way across the clothes, giving a slight hitch of what seemed like passive aggressive comnntary of the messiness under her lip as she stumbled her way to him.

"You do know I was about to sleep?" He gestured his hand upward right along with the exasperation of his eyes. "And I don't recall anything I said having to do with your routine of critique, or of you thinking that would make me want to have you with me even more than I already didn't ask for."

"Bojack, I wasn't going to come over here."

"You should have listened to that instinct."

"I wasn't going to come over here because I wasn't going to do your errand that you asked me to do at all in the first place. It felt-wrong. To myself. I was going to say no, and I had no doubt in my mind. I was even going to call you on the phone and tell you to stop bothering the both of us with your attempts and questions-"

"You should have done this first. It would have guaranteed to make me accept it and made me not want to have anything to do with asking you to begin with."

"Bojack, how many more times are you going to allow yourself to push away being seen? Do you know how rare it is for anyone to want to ascribe anything to do with being human to you at all? Do you know how rare it is for someone to even want to be able to love you, or to even think of it? Most people go their entire lives not even so much as having it even apart of their possibility of existence, and only get chea and fleeting dreams of it at best. And you want to dry and forget something that even I felt-that I felt compelled to came all the way over here and tell you about. And you want to crush it off as a chore or as some forgettable scrabble just because you're in the mood to rot and whine, the same way you always do-"

Bojack's ears flew downward entirely again, flare in his eyes of his own insult as he snapped, "hey."

"Bojack-" Princess Carline gave in a hitch of her breath as she interrupted the attempt of her words that were stumbling out at what seemed like a breathless speed; her fingertips played along with her wrist as she turned her head to the side for a moment, her aged expression turned up into a pout of thought as her fingertips trailed beside her wrist. Though the insult in Bojack's eyes didn't decrease, he began to feel a slight release as his eyes became less defensive and more curious towards her troublement. "Look, I didn't come here to give you a speech, or even life advice. And for a moment, especially when I came to pick up your own personal assignment and she got in the car and then decided to get out to find you-"

Bojack's eyes flared open in surprise. "She what?"

Princess Caroline's eyes flared upward in an exhausted insult as she snapped her head up in exasperation.

"I came over here because I was going to drive home, and then I was going to settle in with my daughter and try to forget that I wasted even half a moment on something that I know is a waste of time and a life at this point-"

"Great. You can leave now."

"Bojack-"

Bojack got himself up abruptly, eyes defiant as his expression glared as he looked at her with a genuine heated insult; her expression winced into an almost pitiable unknowing as her own puffed and wrinkles eyes followed his movement as he abruptly got himself up, arms still crossed, ears flown back in pointed defiance.

"I'm serious." He indicated his head to the door, life in his eyes dimmed for the moment. "I've had a long and hard time today trying to figure out what is going to lead to what, how to deal with how terrible everything feels and how it's going to end up punishing the both of us long term-and the impossibility of how I can't deal with that. I feel terrible, all the time, and especially tonight. So, yes, I did come in here and started flying my clothes onto the ground, because I want to make sense of this and I want to make the right choice-but you wouldn't have come stumbling over here with your cladded insults of what is clearly an arrival of thinking that you can talk me into something quality, when we both know that that isn't going to happen, and you know that, which is why you're trying to make a joke of it. You've succeeded." He pointed a finger as his plush body was leaned forward in his insult, as well as tired age that caught up to him he most in the middle of the intensity of the argument. He waved his hand to the front of the door as Princess Caroline continued to gaze at him with that empathic curve of her sympathy and exhaustion. "I don't need to be grated more than I already am. If you want to talk in a few month when things clear a bit, maybe I'll have the energy to stand what we do to each other. But after the way things have felt with her-I won't. I can't."

Princess Caroline turned her head away from Bojack, the wear of her eyelids closed as the puffy wrinkles of her eyes seemed to deepened as she gave a vague breath of a sigh for a breath pause that Bojack could sense the weight of, and whether he wanted it or not, he felt a small guide of respect of question come over him for a moment as he heard it. Her sharp green eyes turned back up to Bojack, pink hands now firmly encircled on her dress as she gaze at him in earnest.

"Part of the reason why I decided to answer your call, to do your chores and to allow myself to go along with it despite everything that I just said-part of the reason as to why I came over here and added on an extra painful step despite the fact that I know it's the last thing either of us want is because of the fact that I knew you must be in some kind of torment tonight. I know you well enough, and no matter what kind of stereotypes come around through the status of men like you or your habits, while the rest of the world is reacting to the constant meaninglessness and stupidity of all of this and of constant existence, I know you're digging yourself into an increased sense of tormented reflecting on things and overthinking and trying to come to a conclusion in your thoughts that can reach depth to an artistic degree, and I knew I had to come and find you after what I found. What I felt I knew in the back of my head from the second I came to know it-and it felt far bigger than me to even attempt to ignore it."

Bojack's eyes eased into inquiry as he turned his head over and gazed at her, expression furrowed as he watched her with one brow raised. His teeth poked lightly, and the emotion of his eyes were revealed in a small curious if not pained question.

"Closest thing to something that sounds like a genuine reason tonight that you've said. What do you mean?"

Though there was a slight edge to a small smile to Princess Caroline's lips, it seemed to be of one that was in exhausted revelation, and Bojack certainly felt the sentiment of it as his eyes turned as he watched her in caution; and there was a dullness between them that came along with the connection of their jaded exhaustion but of the fullness of life that came along with the bonding of seeing one another and their life in its entirely. She eased her hand down to where she had a gray coat fractionally thrown over her shoulders, her pink hand beginning to dig inside of the pocket while her hands began to thread into it with a restless discovery. Bojack's expression began to meld into a somewhat more curious ease of thought as he watched her pull out a small metal silver ring; his bewilderment, executed into a stoic natural rhythm of a grace, widened as he watched her raise the ring up between her fingertips. The earnest and well meaning intention kept present in her eyes as she gave him a softened raise of her expression while she lifted it from where she had pulled it from her pocket.

"I found this thing right as I was driving home; right when you called me a few hours before, high on crack and having that uneven crack and drunk hitch to your voice as you tried to meld your words together into something coherent-"

Bojack's eyes eased away from her in shame. "I'm sorry."

"And I would have hung up. In any other scenario, I would have hung up and let it go for the night. I wasn't in the mood to try and appease you for the night, or ever. But on the way home, there was so much goddamn traffic, and I needed to get out a stretched my legs, even just for half a moment. The sky was beautiful for such an over populated and densely trafficked area-with all the honking and the yelling, you'd think it would be impossible to find any peace. But I looked up to the sky and I saw this orange blood red light of the end of the day, and I felt this serenity come over me for a long moment."

Bojack's eyes dilated in thought, in that concerned and stoic fashion that spoke of a sense of contained graceful concern while he turned his expression down, ears turned down.

'Sounds beautiful." His eyes turned to her, eyelids heavily hooded as he gave her a pointed pouted look. "Sounds like something that you didn't need to come and tell me about."

"I was going to go home and go about my work for the night. I wanted to-I have my daughter, Judah, a full life, and I knew I didn't want either of us to get pulled back to something that I feel like we both graduated from. But I needed to get out and stretch my legs-I was sitting in that car for literal hours until my back was aching-"

"Hours?" He raised his brow dryly. "Isn't everywhere you go within reasonable driving distance? You wouldn't leave your daughter alone."

"No, I know. I just mean that the traffic held me up for so long that it may as well have been hours. At first I was pissed off, tired, and I could feel how much the day had worn down on me and how empty it felt and I could have sworn all I wanted to do was get back to my daughter; but I stepped out in the middle of that screaming, empty, polluted traffic full of all those angry people and the long day they had been dragged down and I just felt this black emptiness of complete exhaustion and hopelessness-"

"Isn't the entire reason of having a daughter is to have a warm family to get home to? I thought the entire reason why you wanted one so bad was because of days like that. Couldn't have been so down if you had all that to get back to."

"Yeah. I know-but-" Her sharp green eyes seemed troubled as she turned the wear of her expression down, giving a soft shrug, almost seeming bashful. "It's not easy being in a world like this-I know I like to act like I climb on top and use people as my steps-"

"Really. I didn't notice."

She winced. "What I mean to say is that the homeless problem has been so much worse lately, and seeing all these dirty people wandering the streets and after a long day of fighting with people who so clearly have that desperate bloody look in their eyes while they sputter from their lips begging that I take their script so they don't end up like that-how sheerly inhuman it all is and just feeling the full weight of it coming over me after a long day like that. I can't ignore it. I feel it too deeply by the end of days like that, and I see everyone attempting the same distraction and avoidance in everyone. Sometimes, it just feels like too much, like this harrowing emptiness; especially when I got out of that car and saw all the pollution and screaming, the emptiness of people." The already aged puffiness of her eyes increased as she gazed forward in a form of authenticity she would only give the years of experience she had with Bojack. "Of myself."

"Ok-so-" Bojack gave a small shrug, the stoic concern on his features suggesting at least a vague sense of open ended question to her troublement. "What about that made you come here?"

"I tapped my foot on this ring. It's a small silver thing-I know it's not much." Her troubled eyes turned to where she had the ring placed in between her fingertips, looking it over with a guide of guilt. "I know it sounds stupid."

"Sentimentality based off of someone you're smart enough to cut off does not sound like you. I agree with that."

Princess Caroline gave a slight chuckle, bittersweet and more weary than amused, but still relieved to have made the connection with Bojack. Whatever attempt of conviction she held, it was something that certainly held a lot of weight to her, and Bojack was feeling the weight of his own curiosity drawn further to it.

"But when I stubbed my dumb toe on this thing and looked down at it, in the middle of the pollution and the wretched black air and the orange sky and its dim reflection right before it settled into the end of the day, I just felt something come over me. I almost would have felt too disgusted with myself to ignore it. I don't know how to explain it, but it felt like it was something I would feel this black shame for if I didn't act on the feeling that came over me from seeing it. I felt like if I went home and ignored it, I wouldn't be able to stand it."

"Stubbornly determined." Bojack allowed himself a smile raise of a small that was offered to the quiet nature of their authenticity, and she picked up on it as she allowed him a glint of an edge of her own gentleness while meeting his expression. "Sounds familiar. That part I do believe."

"It was strange. I took it and I wanted to go home but when I turned to get into the damn car, when I leaned in and started the car it just felt-wrong. Like I was betraying myself, or something larger than me that would feel just-disgusting to try and deny myself. I took it in the car and played with it for a little while, and-huh." She cut herself off with a slight edge of a low laugher that suggested a vague sense of shame as she eased her hand beside the fur that stuck out from her cheek, smoothing some of it back bashfully. "Sounds silly, and I know that it partly must have been because I was too exhausted to not have an experience like this. But while I was playing with the small silver ring in between my two fingertips, I took to looking up at the sky in front of me and looked over the expanse of the traffic just as it began to start up uo-I saw this beautiful light coming over the sky. The orange had started to dim away from the rest of the black dusk of it, and in front of me was there this huge spanning out in front of me of what seemed like this spinning madness of steams or leaves or something similar of this weird..maddening beauty of a thing, eyes turning out and coming from the plants. It seemed-sickly, and then something of a silhouette came from it as it imploded in this weirs grotesque, what almost seemed like bewildering madness as it spun out from the sky. At first I couldn't even take or allow myself to believe what I was seeing because I don't consider myself to be a head in the clouds and wishy washy type person at all; but the amount of that pained and sickly beauty in front of me was more than I knew how to take, and I could feel this odd wonder coming over me. I don't know how to explain it, but the implosion of the beauty and the grim and black and maddening black almost artistic grace of it seemed like it was of something that reminds me when you tried to tell me your tormented dreams."

"Tormented dreams." Some of the edge to Bojack's expression came back to his eyes again as his expression grazed her over. "You were never a fan of any of those."

"I never thought it was a good idea to indulge you. I knew how much you already had so much in your headspace and how hard it was for you to not go spinning out. I never wanted to encourage that, and sometimes you told me anyway, but-" Her sharp eyes eased down in thought, and the exhaustion came over her features as she gave a light shrug. "Well, anyway. I wanted to come and tell you that this strange profound pain and obligation came over me when I saw that-and looking back now it's not hard to attribute it to being exhausted and too in my own head.

"Obviously." Despite Bojack's attempt at being blunt and dismissive towards Princess Caroline and the way she was talking and using his usual comfort of trying to take the easy and reasonable way out for the sake of his own comfort, there was a slight few inches of the turn of his pupils that gave away his troubling and wonder.

"Bojack, you have a wide and rich open heart and imagination. One that is more than I've ever been able to be aware of or to even guess or could imagine. It has this entire world to it, and when it's open it's vast and wide and opens up this entire richness of humanity and life I can't even imagine. I don't think most can. But I thought you could at least try and see something that did when I was sitting there and playing with the ring when I saw it. "

"Saw-what?"

"I don't know." She placed a hand on her forehead, wincing as she looked over to the ring in her fingertip, pupils darting as she looked over the simple silver metal. "There were these gray stairs that began to illuminate when they cut through the sky-they were these gray, foggy stacks of this staircase, and I could have sworn I saw your silhouette from behind."

"Really?" Bojack's dry, factual expression, reserved for nothing other than the technical bias of actual reality, kept dry as he gave her a pointed look. "You saw all that and didn't just take yourself home and drink it off or try to tell yourself it was as nonsense as much as the people you force yourself to work with."

"I know it doesn't sound like something I would entertain, much less act on. But I do know your inner life, Bojack. I do know about the beauty and wisdom of how you see things, the inherent way that you see life and people for what it, and I knew that when I saw that image, whether it was from diluted disillusionment or whether it was from some other drunken state, that I felt the need to rush over here and come and try to tell you that you need to try and keep yourself to that woman." Her dry, exhausted eyes turned down to the silver ring in between her fingertips while Bojack's eyes widened in troublement at the mention of you. Whatever technical dry bondage of invalidating the surreral for the blunt and straightforward, cynical way of anything other than the fact way of life, it broke away entirely from Bojack's expression at the mention of you. "When the vision was done and it had passed over me, I was left with nothing but this ring that I found on the side of the street, and I realized that if I didn't try to come and be apart of what I saw that reminded me of you-that beautiful, maddening, exhustuing man that you are in all of your surreal torment and imagination and the richness of how you are, I knew there was something about myself I wouldn't be able to live with."

"The woman?" Bojack's eyes darted frantically over Princess Caroline's body in question. "That's what this is about?"

She gave a slight hitch of a breath, pouting her mouth upward as she gave a shrug and turned her eyes away in earnest thought.

"Yeah, well. I figured that you more than likely would appreciate something to make you feel like you're not alone in trying to make a choice going forward with this, anyway."

Bojack's eyebrows kept raised, and his expression slowly turned down to where she had the ring placed in her fingertips. He felt his heart increased as he watched it turn between the pads of her fingers, and something came over him that didn't seem entirely like an edge of a challenge.

"So, what? You had a weird vision and decided to come over and give me some garbage you found on the side of the road, then?"

He darted his eyes away in cynical rejection, and Princess Caroline's eyes snapped up to him in a fired insult that came along with the weariness and wear of her exhaustion..

"I know that it's easy for you to take yourself and to convince yourself that rejection and distance is all you can give. I know it's hard to stretch yourself out and to think of something and someone else as something other than just a technicality of pain that you're trying to turn away from."

"If you know, then you're going about that knowledge in a strange way to try and make it your business." Bojack's eyes gave her a last look of his dry eyes as he made his way over to the side of the table, his dry eyes turned down as he gave a small hitch of a rasped breath and eased his hands around the cup-filled in its small circular container to the brim with square ice and whiskey filled to the brim. Bojack's eyes seemed to further protrude in their exhaustion as his eyes turned down and lifted the cup to his lips, turning it back as he felt the burning ease down his throat, and giving a slight tumbled breath of his tone as he visibly winced at the feeling and shook his head lightly.

"Bojack, don't do this. Where is the woman now? Your house?"

Bojack gave another disgusted disgruntlement as he shook his head and gazed back down at the glass that was now clattering with the ice, a slight pout eased across his features as he frowned, then placed it back on the table while he eased his plush body back onto the side of the bed.

"She is at the best place where someone in her position can hope to be in right now. She has good resources, she has a phone, a clear headspace without anyone else telling her what she should do or how she should do it." His eyes were low hooded and dry as he turned his eyes back to Princess Caroline while she walked forward, pout on her expression of her usual discontentment, arms firmly crossed. "In a few days, maybe weeks, she'll have enough perspective to see that one, she dosen't own the house, and two, that she doesn't want what she convinced herself she wanted."

"What she didn't want?" Princess Caroline's eyebrow raised sharply further up. "Or what you didn't want or won't come to terms with unless it has instant gratification?"

Bojack gave her a puffy wince of a glare now, and there was more intention behind the anger this time. "I did the best that I could, you understand me? I took her around for a little while, I held her, I made her feel like-I don't know, like she had a place for a little while, I guess. I gave her a sense of worth. And when she clears her headspace and realizes what's actually going on here, because believe me, she has that emotional intelligence even if it didn't help her in life, she'll come to a conclusion that she can use whatever resources she'd like, how she likes. She'll be fine. We both got something out of-"

"You both got something out of it, you're proud of yourself for at least vaguely doing something that wasn't entirely destructive, I know, I know." Princess Caroline waved her slender hand dismissively as she walked forward, and though the defiance in Bojack's eyes didn't leave, as it was with his usual crumpled and easily dissuade and bewildered inner life, he was cracking easy under the narrative that it was the right thing to turn away from connection; his easiest and most preferred comfort, but by far not of one that he felt soothed by or believed in.

"What would you have me do, then?" Bojack's troubled eyes followed Princess Caroline as she sat herself down in a light and stiff fashion as her eyes turned to the silver ring that was placed between her fingertips, her expression turning it over as she gave a light breath. Bojack's eyes gazed at her pointedly in a gesture that he had a genuine extent of curiosity, and even more than that, powerlessness that he wanted guidance from; he knew he was far too adapt at taking away any spiritual answer he could hope to believe in.

Princess Caroline sighed, the action this time more heavy and business oriented rather than in a washing of uncertain tide of emotions.

"The feeling and the dumb vision wasn't the only reason why I felt compelled to come over here."

"No?"

"There was-I don't know how or if I should explain it. A guy pulled up to me just as I was tone taking in the vision from over the traffic that reminded me and had that rich macoholic feel as you, and at first I tried to ignore him. But he was blaring rock music and he was this massive buffalo man with his shirt ripped and the energy he had looking into me-it was so clear that he was tearing me from the inside out cockily begging for my attention, arm rested beside the door and giving me a look that more than spiritual obligation, made me feel terrified for my life. It was just the way he was, I don't know."

"You let a guy like that dictate how you felt?"

"I mean-not on purpose, obviously." Princess Caroline snapped her head over to Bojack again pointfly, the wrinkles on her face and defiance turned even more violently, and Bojack leaned himself back as he took in the force of her frustration.

"Okay." Bojack's eyes threaded up as he looked over at her in concern, ears lowered back as he did so as he gazed over her with one brow raised. "So, this guy, then, he's the reason why you ended up coming over here and thinking that it would be a good idea to try to convince me that taking a ring would be a good idea to go back to a woman that very clearly is on a different path that I am, to- what, exactly? To go back into knock on the door and to tell 'her hey, I know that there's every single sign that I just did something terrible that shows that I am incapable of committing and that would be a terrible idea to get with me or to do anything that would be significantly involved with me even casually unless you want to get rectangular torn into it despite having a terrible life, but, well, my ex-girlfriend that I have a terrible relationship with so a guy that stared her down the mater uncomfortable so now suddenly it's a good idea?'"

"I know it sounds ridiculous."

"One way of putting it."

Princess Caroline snapped her head over towards Bojack as her eyes eased over against him into a slated flare, and he gave a slight shrug of his shoulders as he continued to look over at her with that genuine inquiry that was used up against a concern of his eyes as he seemed to be encouraging her even within the silence of how he edged her on.

"It's not just that it sounds ridiculous. It doesn't even make sense. You saw a vision that reminded you vaguely of me, and then you found a cheap ring on the ground which, for Los Angeles, is pretty much just regular pollution on a day-to-day basis-except it's not even especially interesting or the rich kind of that can actually get you somewhere, and then you were stared down by another typical creep. I'm not sure what you want me to say to be telling you that the dots are connecting here or that I'm glad that you came over here when I'm trying to be able to clear my head over a mess that I got into that I never should have gotten myself into in the first place-and trying to be able to find peace with the fact that it's in repetition of it and that it's more than likely going to be this way until. Well. You know."

"It wasn't just the fact that he stared me down, or that he stopped in front of me or blared his music or made me feel uncomfortable. It was this-he looked at me like he was trying to be able to get something out of me, in a sense, and after that surreal pattern that I just saw in front of me that was already unusual for someone like me to have, especially when all I want to do is to get into this technical headspace of just doing what needs to get done and then getting home to my family and just looking forward to being able to do that, it was weird that I had this man just staring down to me after all that. Also the fact that I concerned myself with this ring that gave me this weird guilt that if I didn't concern myself with the decisions that you were in lately, that somehow, it was going to come back and it was going to punish me for it. I turned my head and I looked over at the buffalo man as he looked me over, and he seemed to be looking at me with this certain kind of leering and mocking look that was up against his expression while he looked over at me with this cocky look on his face, and when I glared at him while I pulled it the ring and pulled it further to the front of my chest and try to tell him to buzz off, he ended up telling me the strangest thing."

"Well, I can't imagine that the standards would be very high in terms of quality experience at this point or of anything making sense."

"He told me-" Princess Caroline breathed in a tense breath as she closed her worn eyes to think. "-He asked me something strange."

"No kidding."

"He asked me if I knew anything about Samantha lately, and if I had seen you around. When I asked him if that was an old girlfriend that you had that I was just never aware of, he gave me a certain kind of look that seemed as if I was intentionally insulting him, or trying to downplay his intelligence, or as if I was the crazy one for not knowing who this Samantha was that he brought up. He said if I saw you with her around, he said that I needed to tell him or 'someone like him' immediately, and if I didn't, he said that there would more than likely be trouble. When I told him I didn't know what he was talking about, he only abruptly ended honking his horn over me and then cackled as he looked glared at the ring that I had in my hand, and it almost caused me to jump out of my skin in and of itself with shock."

"So typical Los Angeles random asshole stuff, then. Guy gets a massive car and then thinks that he has a massive ego and is important enough to be able to do and to say whatever he wants and of course that he's going to feel good about it because now everything's perfect now that he has some sort of physical tangible ownership to make him feel better. I'm still not seeing what's remarkable."

"When I swore at him and asked him what was wrong with him, he indicated to head over towards the ring and said that I needed to be able to execute what I needed to do sooner rather than later, or else it would be my problem and my family's problem. When I felt this certain kind of fear inside of me because I could tell that he meant it with that look his eye, that was when I felt a mark on me. It seemed as if he had a certain kind of way of being confident in the way that he spoke; and even worse, a way of executing it."

"So-then what happend?"

"he just turned on his horn and continued honking his horn on me to the point where I was practically blaring with being death-and after that he just started off the car and he told me that I only had a limit amount of time and he said that I knew it more than I thought that I did and what I tried to shout out to him-physically leaned my body over and screamed him because of how angry I was about screaming such nonsense into me and instilling such fear inside of my daughter back at home when I had already had such a long day it was already feeling so terrible. All I did was see him swerve through the traffic, and when I tried my best to get his license plate-which I did very clearly see because I'm very apt about stuff like this-" She stapped her fingertip onto the front of her brow with the slight cockiness as she did so. "But he was gone before I even knew it, and I could have sworn it was like he dissipated."

Bojack's eyes turn to the ring as he looked over towards the way that her hand was trembling slightly, and the silver ring, in all of its cheap jewelry, was barely held against her hand as it almost seemed as if the metal was beginning to trip away from the way that she was struggling to hold it. His eyes winced as he looked her over, then leaned forward and took his hands to thread up against her.

She gave a tense breath she looked back up and felt the way that his hands eased up against her own, ears lowered, and with the slight kindness on his expression did he begin to pull it from the edge of the slight of her trembling pam. The true exhaustion comer over her now as she placed a thin palm on the disheveled extent of her pink fur as she pressed her hand up against her forehead, fingers threading through where the e strands were clearly showing along the true depth of her worn day.

"Listen, if nothing else, I can definitely appreciate the fact you came all the way over here and decided to be able to dedicate yourself this much to me when I know how much you have on your plate these days."

His eyes turned down over to the silver cheap ring that was now up against his own fingertips as he looked it over, frowning as he felt the metal sensation in his palms as he began to turn it over against his hands and have a slight edge of his breath while he gazed over at the ring that was glistening beside his own eyes. Cold, sleek, and cool to the touch; and also entirely cheap, and clearly Los Angeles road garbage.

His expression lowered as he looked back over at her as she turned her troubled eyes back over towards him as he began to place it up against the front of the white fuzzy pocket of his robe, threading his fingertips up against it as he padded his hands along with it as he looked over with still that slight exhaust and dryness on his eyes.

"And I am going to say that I'm not necessarily surprised about the fact that you exhausted yourself so much to the point that you would do something that is this questionable and out of character especially when it comes to being involved into something that you must know is just something that's a part of me trying to be able to make the years of my life go by in a little bit less unfathomably worse way."

"Why won't you try to put some meaning in your life? You don't have to do it with me."

Princess Caroline's eyes turned up as she looked over at him with insistence, her hand already trembling a little bit from her exhaustion in Bojack feeling the increased extent of the guilt that he had towards the fact of how much she did just for the sake of trying to be able to make him feel a little bit of peace. Even if she didn't mean to; and Bojack knew her well enough to know that she didn't, just as he knew her well enough to know and that she could sense how he was trying to push her out.

"PC-'"

"I don't understand why you need to keep running away from anything that comes knocking at your door and while you feel like you're cursed to be able to live this empty and terrible life your entire life and that there is nothing or anyone that could ever come along to be able to change it. I'm losing my mind just watching you live the life and it's not even my life or my loss to even have."

"Exactly." Bojack's ears flew downward as he looked over at her with that firm glare again. "So why do you keep doing it?"

"I can't imagine how you must feel-if you weren't so good at being able to put on this dry, stoic performance of trying to be able to pretend like it's not something that's completely hitting you from the inside out."

"You don't need to try to get cranky about it. And no matter how much you think that you need to be able to be obligated about it, you don't need to be."

His expression turned down as dry eyes looked over against the silver ring that he was gently cradling inside of his fingertips as he looked it over, then gave up as he grunted and began to get his way up with Princess Caroline's troubled eyes following him with her body pressed up against herself in desperate question. Her hands were pressed up against her arms as she was fully tense and shrunken within her detriment of how much the day had worn on her.

"But you've made your point, and I don't want you doing this anymore than you already have. It's not fair to either of us, and if I wanted to be able to change my mind then I would. About everything in, general. But I'm sixty, PC, a little bit over, and I don't need to worry too much about much of anything at this point except just getting through every day, and that's all that life needs to be about. That's all that life ever has been, and I'm sick of feeling ashamed or worried about it or overthinking it as if there's something to be done about it because there isn't."

"You do realize you're just setting yourself up for further hurt by carrying yourself around with that kind of narrative, right?" Princess Caroline's eyes followed Bojack in vulnerable sympathy as he walked the small whiskey glass over to where he ha a small bar. He grabbed for the small whiskey, turning it over as he spilled it into the glass cup, and gave a slight chuckled rasped breath.

"I mentioned the time of my life for a reason." He gave a soft sigh of a breath, and Princess Caroline eased her eyes down into a low reflection as she gave a short breath, shoulders lowered. "At this point it's just staying numb for as long as I can, and I know that I can, because I've been doing it for a long time. It won't be too long now." He turned as he kept his heavy hooded eyes turned over to Princess Caroline, and she kept her lip pouted as she looked up at him in a tentative gaze if question.

"That's the way you want to head out? By keeping your head down until it's all over?"

Bojack's eyes turned down in distant tentative thought, then gave a small shrug of his shoulders while he met her questioning ones with a dry expression.

"What else would you have me do? Nothing else has ever worked."

Princess Caroline gave an abrupt sigh, turning her eyes down in empty concern over to where she looked over where Bojack had sat with the ring a moment before. After a moment of her eyes tentatively looking in front of her in thought, she raised herself up, giving a small roll of her shoulders while she gave him a curt, somber nod.

"The woman is fine, by the way. She seemed eager to get home once she realized the system you were setting up for her in regards to trying to clear her head."

"Really?" Bojack's eyes turned up to her in somber thought, ears perked. Princess Caroline shoulders the bag back onto her body as she began to walk her way steadily to the door. Bojack kept his body back beside the counter, hooded eyes following as she stopped in front of the door. Her saw her adjust, then turn her head as she gazed over Bojack with tentative thought.

"Hey, don't take anything anyone says or anything you think so seriously, ok? At the end of the day, no one knows what's really going on. All you can do is take care of yourself. That's all there is."

Bojack's eyes were still empty and considering, but he winced as he turned his eyes back up to Princess Caroline as a vague softness entered his tone as he spoke;

"She enjoyed it? She's-comfortable?"

Princess Caroline's eyes darted down to where Bojack had the ring in between his fingertips, the silver cheapness easing between his fingertip; he hadn't release or let go of it once, and if anything, his fingertips seemed even further gripped beside it now.

"I think you should marry her, Bojack. That's the reason why I came over here to give you the ring. There's no tangible reason for it, there's no real reason why I should believe or have faith in the way I felt it. But there it is. And as much as you think you're at a point where you feel like you need to let go and accept yourself as you are, I just as much feel like you need to take a chance for something good for once. I know you don't like pain anymore than you like having to deal with the pain that you have in the first place, but that woman is in the most pain than she'll more than likely ever process and that I know you and I have ever encountered in our lives. The pain that you feel with one another-the way that it connects; it's not for nothing, Bojack. The messy pain and connection that you feel is ironically part of how we know we're all connected and come from the same core of desire and life. Use that. Please. For the love of God. Time is going to wretch you down more than you think if you don't. The way it spreads over you destroys you over time more than you think."

She turned without so much as looking him in the eye, giving a slight hitch of her breath, as if she had released something that had come with her since the moment she had entered. She made her way to the door, Bojack's eyes still dim and hollowed as he followed her while she opened the door and began to step her way out, and though she paused as she stepped into the hallway, she didn't turn her head over her should again before she began to walk her way down the hallway, shouldering the bag beside her as her high heels began to echo down the hallway. Bojack's expression and the emotion in his eyes barely moved; as if he had been expecting her to say as she did, or as if there was something inside of him that had long since accepted that of which anything that could have been heard in his stoic and made up heart.

The muscles on his face furrowed as he turned his troubled eyes back down to the ring, turning the cheap silver jewelry in his fingertip while his tentative eyes looked it over. He winced as his ears lowered, turning his somber and wretched eyes to the window that looked out and over from the bridge that Princess Caroline had driven you over to his home.

The words hadn't surprised him; and if anything, even if it hadn't been directly acknowledged by either of them, they had both understood that it was the sentiment as to the reason why she showed up; there was an unspoken agreement between the two of them as she had walked in that there was something that they both were acknowledging just by talking that Bojack had discovered something unusual for himself. It was as to whether or not he would take it upon himself to take the small shard of what he had found curated specifically for him in an empty world where people were more so tumbled reflections of their circumstances with very little inside, much less to connect to Bojack's specified torment and how it had molded him into a companion over time, that was the core of the question. What didn't surprise him was the execution of it; of, for the first time, that something had entered his life that was life changing, and rather than being born of dear and abrasive foreign fear and avoidance, he was feeling nothing except for a stoic, reflective energy of perception.

He walked his way over to the hotel window, still turning the cheap metal in his fingertip as he walked his way to the front of the window, hearing the occasional honk and call that came from the street now that the after work traffic had quietened down for the night. He felt the full emptiness of his reflection come over him like a wave as he sat himself down by the small wooden chair sat in front of the large window; though the hotel was in an attempt to be modern, there was some old antique architecture and furniture that gave away its true state and form, and as he leaned back beside the chair, he would feel the full dust and emptiness of the space.

He had come into the world empty, bewildered, fearful, deprived of love and sickly in many ways; at conflict within existence in and of itself from the start, and was a mirror reflection of frustration of others, and would be gone as he left as a whisper of everyone who had come and would go after. He felt a gey veil over his life now; he saw himself for the repetitive finite nature of was, unremarkable, especially even as it had been felt to himself, abused and detested from the world, worn and tired beyond what he ever could have processed and cursed away from simplicity, and then gone before his time in regard to his zest for anything he could have hoped to find any zest with.

As his dry and tired eyes turned down to the ring while he turned it against his fingertips, he felt the energy in his eye dim further as he leaned his body back against the wooden chair, leaning his arm against the back of it as he felt the wood creak. His expression became more pathetic, thoughtful, and broken in wretched thought as he gazed over the cheap metal, ears grazed down as his eyes winced in thought.

Part of him believed he was too tragically caught up in a make believe identity he had made for the sake of believing he was above and different from others; a flawed human survival instinct to satisfy the want for identity. To associate with you publicly wouldn't tear either of you down entirely; though it was one of the heaviest things for Bojack to admit, he knew his relevance to people's entertainment was long since faded. And you were less than nothing in people's eyes; and he knew that just as well, and in an odd way, especially in this regard, that was a resounding protection for the both of you.

He turned his head up and over to the cloudy and muggy sky that was reflected across the front of the bridge , eyes distant into an edge of exhaustion as he leaned his body back. The sky was passing over with a wet dry gray indifference through the watered white fog and mist that passed over through the sky, and he allowed it to pass by, muggled and unremarkable, as it surpassed over the state of the bridge. His teeth poked, expression dry and reflective in the detriment of his melancholy as he turned his eyes over the sky as gray as his perception and mood with nothing but the empty agreement of existence to follow.

There was a sudden loud honk, and an abrasive scram and a swear that came from the bridge. Bojack's eyes widened as ears shot up while he raised himself from the chair, giving a slight whimpered breath as he began to make his way to the front of the window that met his eyes. His expression winced as he kneeled himself down and threaded his hands in front of the window, eyes wincing as he turned his eyes over to where he could see a man getting his way out from a car that seemed to have swerved itself abruptly from an awkward curve of an angle, the man getting his way out as he began to swear at the equally hard eyed passenger behind him while they stepped their way out, offering their own shouting and demanding voice from the open door as both voices began to snap and thread through their violence in the air, calling to one another in their black and soulless argument, and Bojack could tell even just from the way their voices were raised up as they cut through the air that they were lunging at one another's throats with their words.

While the two men continued to shout and throw their insults loud enough that it seemed to cut even through the natural distance between Bojack and even the thick of the windows and walls, there was a sudden and abrupt screech of tires that slammed itself beside the two men as they continued to shout at one another, one even taking to stepping forward as he seemed to have a pale hand raised up in his abrasive frustration. Behind the two of them, a pure white pigeon man exited his way out from his car, dressed sharply in a suit, as he eased his hand on the door and got his way out from the slick black that was clearly meant to be a statement. The pigeon eased his palms beside his suit as he readjusted while he watched the both of them, both men too lost in their abrasive fight and insult to even so much as notice how he stood and observed the both of them from the side.

The pigeon man stepped forward after a moment of what seemed like a distant thought, his eyes turning as he looked between the men who continued to call against one another in their continued abrasive insult. Bojack eased his body further over to the edge of the window, his eyes glistened with emotion as he looked over the window and over to were the pigeon began to stick his hand in through his tuxedo, and for a moment did it seem as if he was rummaging for something, his body swaying while he kept sharp eyes turned between them.

Before there was time to process as to what the pigeon was doing or his plan, the pigeon snapped his hand out from his suite, and in his hand was a black gun; there was nothing that Bojack could process for very quickly except for the fact as he saw the shiny black glistened against the side of his hand. The action was quick and swift, much more than Bojack could take to understand, and before he could speak he saw the pigeon snap the gun up to the sky, and with a loud and sudden booming gunshot and a flair of a sparked and sudden spiritual light did it implode over to the gray sky. A golden white beaming orb of an end of a light came bursting out as it shot up from the gun and over to the the layer of the sky that had existed in its indifferent previously; blinding, and for a moment to Bojack so melancholically beautiful that it reminded him of the few nights he had been choked by the beauty of the full life of the city of Los Angeles when he had spent long and inhuman nights with nothing but disoriented and broken thought accompanying him, even empty and as consistently abusive as much as it had been for Bojack.

The two men gave an abrupt yell as they tripped themselves over their feet, snapping their heads over to where the pigeon was standing between them. The shot of the golden orb of a light that seemed like a reflection of grief and an odd beauty so rich it was choking began to subside along with the way it had shot out with the abrasive reflection of the golden light; there was a passing of the glimmer of it as it flowed its way over through the passage of the gray sky, until the golden sweep of the wave of the light began to meld into the gray clouds as it shimmered and melted within it. Bojack's eyes were humbly and pathetically overtaken as he snapped his head upward, voice chocked as he gave an breath that spoke of his humbly human fear while he felt himself choked by the feeling as he watched the golden shimmer implode across the sky.

"What the fuck, man?" One of the men abruptly stepped back, his hands pressed in front of him as he raised his hands up, stepping back tentatively. The pigeon kept te gun cocked beside his head as he stepped his way forward between them, and though Bojack could make out no direct detail from his expression, his air was one that gave away someone who was especially focused on the extent of an intense focus on the two men in front of him, the gun still sizzling from the golden shooting that had seemed to come from far more than just pistol.

"Why do you feast yourselves on the inept and equally sinful and bewildered and lost extent of patheticness of your emotional detriment? You come from the same rot and the same earth, both disgusted at one another for the reason reasons of which you could fall into. You come into one another's energy and concern with the idea of abusing and invalidation an emotional thread of a journey just as much full of your own flaw and muggy headedness as much as you could ever come to experience within yourself. You are a lost and disgusting emotional process of contradictions, changing phases, beliefs and the ever turning and constant tide of emotion-and yet you come here with the sentiment of destroying one another for doing the same and for concerning and influencing one another with something as knowingly finite and inherently flawed with character downfall, shortcomings, of emotional grim and excessive of rot of emotional pathetic shortcomings rendered as pathetic and useless in its wake and especially with the long term of knowledge. The only one who would be concerned with such a pathetic and grimy nature would be one as pathetic as himself-by even involving yourself, you prove yourself as the very thing you mock yourself at!"

Another gunshot imploded from the gun; and Bojack gave an abrupt yell as his ears flew back as he snapped himself away from the window. This time the gun shot with black soot as if it were a regular one, the black fog and mug imploding out of it as it cut through the man that had been walking towards the other with his hands thrown in front of him. A bloody, mundane and violent gunshot raised itself with demand though the front of where the two men had indulged themselves a moment before, and Bojack's ears snapped back as his eyes winced while he watched the pigeon settle himself as the man's body snapped back, his body slammed in front of the car, blood splattered beside it as the man's eyes rolled back, voice choked as his body imploded beside the car.

Bojack's eyes kept widened in shock as he snapped his eyes to where the pigeon turned his attention over to the other man who had been less demanding in the conflict, and the pigeon took to putting the gun back inside of his suit and entirely out of vision as he began to walk to the other man, talking to him with what seemed like a more somber air. The blood from the man who was shot was limp beside the car, and the other men kept stepping back as he snapped his expression over to the car, though for the most part his air kept settled and accepting as he kept his eyes on the pigeon while he began to amuse him in his conversation, though hs body kept tense.

Bojack's winced and puffy eyes focused on the scene for as long as his attention would allow him, his fingers cramped beside his hands as he dared to step in front of the window as he watched the pigeon man engage in the conversation with the man in front of him, tones now low enough that Bojack could no longer make our their conversation. There was the vague sound of sirens, and the occasional call and reaction of the driving by of people passing beside the pigeon as they continued to drive their way down the street, some taking to lowering the window as the turned their heads over to the people behind them; and the sounds of the chaos that came from the line of people and of the cars increased, right along with the distant end of the sirens; though with every passing moment, they seemed to have more reason for intention than they did previously.

Bojack's eyes darted to the side as the muscles on his face furrowed into further intense thought, and he felt a slight jab around his air as he abruptly snapped his body upward. He gave a slight hitch of a breath as he rushed his way over to the bags and the luggage he had thrown to the side in the intentional attempt of abrasive disarray as he kneeled himself onto the ground, eyes small and dilated in emotion as he grabbed for the clothes and began to toss them into the three luggages. He slammed his hands against the front of the carrier as he threw it onto the rest of his luggage, giving slight hitching and panicked breaths as he tried to calm the chaos of his headspace while rasped hitches of his breath and panicked uneven panting left his mouth as his eyes were dilated in abrasive panic, slamming both of his suits on top of one another as he settled for zipping them up, then, with both hands pressed with a shaking hand onto the handles did he shoulder his way through the creaked open door Princess Caroline had left it open as, giving abrupt and frantic breaths, pupils dilated as he tripped over his feet and began to rush his way down the hotel hallway.

He checked himself out of th hotel as fast as he cold have managed, thanking the man with a quick and timid whispered breath as he jammed his hand to the man and handed him the money. He thanked him quickly as he was given leave to leave the hotel, crumpling the money in his hand, then rushing his way out the door, wincing as he turned his head over to where there were not several policemen and blaring red sirens surrounding the area.

Bojack gave a quick hitch of his breath as his eye started frantically while he began to jam his way outside of the hotel door, ears lowered as he began to rush his way over to where he could see the way that several different policemen were talking to each other in a circle. BoJack's eyes started over towards where he could see the very same man that had previously been getting into the fight step his way back, talking over towards a woman police officer, elephant type, that was looking over at him with a notepad in her hand as she continuously kept asking him questions about what had occurred. The pigeon man and his gun, most especially the golden light and that of which had been left with a residue up against the black sky as it had reflected up, was now entirely gone beyond recall, and BoJack felt an odd black devastation and shakiness, as if something reassuring had been taken away that had reminded him of something that he had wanted to be, had abruptly been robbed away from him.

"Hey."

He walked his way up over towards where the policemen were circling around each other as they were talking to each other lowly while they were giving each other reports, notepads in various different gadgets and walkie talkies in their hands as they talk to one another in their low, abrasive voices that spoke of something that was being taken detrimentally seriously. Bojack gave a hitch of her breath that he winced and looked over between them as several of them turn their head up and looked over at BoJack, himself placing the two of his suitcases onto the ground with a grunt as he looked them over, teeth poked as he did so as he played with his hands and looked over between at least a few of them.

What happened?"

His eyes turned as he looked over to the the road where the pigeon man had been, and not even his car that he had shown up in with the black shiny metal, much less the suit or the gun of that of what he had bore, seem to be showing itself, there is now nothing except for the emptiness of the man of that of who had shown up, and, of course, much to Bojack's hollowing surprise as he looked over to where the fight had even started to begin with, the very same man that had started the fight in the most aggressive way to begin with, his body now completely lost into a pool of his own blood with his mouth open and his head turned back, seeming to be a very reflection of the detriment of humanity and of rotten of emptiness while his mouth was now open entirely, as much of a dark reflective emptiness of existence that seemed as if it was an execution of every single negative thought and mood that Bojack ever tried his best to be able to fight every single day.

"Just two men who decided to get a little bit too cocky in a place where if they had had even half of a brain they would have understood that it was going to lead to more trouble than anybody who had a will would have been able to bargain for."

One of the policemen looked over at BoJack with the slight hard look, almost as if they were trying to be able to analyze him down as he looked him over. Bojack's eyes darted down as ears lowered, stepping his way back tentatively.

"You wouldn't happen to know anything about the two men that decided to start a fight that violent, both with word and with body, that badly that quickly after the events of the museum tonight, would you?"

"Oh." Bojack's eyes darted in insecurity. "Um-"

"Because we know that it was a particularly exclusive event where only certain people who had rights would have been able to show up in the first place-as in, certain kind of special financial gain, and we know that you went with an especially strange woman that looked as if the last place that she belonged was to a place like that. But of course, someone like you would have been able to make the decision of thinking that it would have been a good idea to bring someone like that."

Bojack tentatively raised a finger in a cramped gesture to the policeman "Well-"

"But, as sweet as that can be, or at least, the idea of it, though many of us would be quick to be able to disagree, if you do end up bringing people that clearly do not belong at a place or at the very least the general overall public opinion is that a person like that has not deserved being able to go to a place like that, there is usually by far and by large this general idea that it might attract people who will get ideas that they might have an opening into a place that they have not deserved, that they're not of the right quality for or that they do not earn."

The policeman snapped his pen up against a small notepad where it looked like he had been jotting down several different observations of the crime in, and BoJack's expression grimaced as he heard at the click of the medal of the pen up against the front of the notepad as the policeman turned his eyes and looked over at Bojack in question, the suspicion in his eyes becoming increasingly more obvious as he did so. He was a white dog, with a sharp blue hat snapped on top of his head as he looked over at BoJack with his eyebrows raised, suit firmly pressed up around his body and a firm hard looking his eyes that would have suggested plenty of interactions where he had had to be able to take the majority of abrasiveness of being able to execute the law. Bokack felt his heart quickening as he looked into him, be getting to feel the way that he's usual casual cocky and teasing way that he'd get himself out of any kind of situation that would have rendered him into trouble was beginning to fall away into that far more sad-eyed, completely eaten up guilt void that he tend to share and to bring around with him, whether he knew it or liked it or not.

There was a complete and absolute flowered of natural guilt and apology that was so deep within him that it ate him from the inside out, not completely unlike the way that he constantly felt as if every moment of his life was fighting against some unspeakable sense of constant emptiness that would never be won, no matter how many times he thought that he could have permanently won against something that was inherently permanent from the moment that he had been born and was only becoming increasingly more persistent as he got older, the pressure increasing as his age increased, rather than decreasing the way that he would have liked his conversation with Princess Caroline to convince him that it was.

"I saw absolutely nothing to do with it. I mean-" He gave a slight shrug as he slung his suitcase further into his palm while he looked over to his topless red car that he had used to drive over here to begin with-and desperately wishing that he had not involved himself in the first place. "I didn't see anything and that would have led me to believe that it had anything to do with anything that I did, I mean. And I don't see why anybody-not even authority-would have any reason to be able to believe that they have any kind of reason to think that they should lead it to someone like me just because that's a social stereotype. I mean-" He gave a slight nervous chuckle, his eyes wincing upwards nervously as his shoulders shrugged casually along with him as the dog policeman continued to analyze him with that look that was far more abrasive and suffocating and less compassionate than Bojack was hoping for as he met the dog's eyes, who didn't bother from keeping eyes hard and glaring over against Bojack in question. "The law has to be a lot more specific than that than just punishing somebody just for the sake of dumb social cliche stereotypes, right? You guys would be out of a job if you just started to just jab your fingers at wherever you wanted to the second that's something started to look suspicious. That would be crazy."

"What's crazy is that random crimes of people deciding to inject themselves into places that used to happen all the time that nobody used to concern themselves with or to get so angry about is becoming increasingly more common."

The white dog turned his head over towards where the dead man was, his eyes still rolled back, his face in a complete tremor as he did so, and his mouth twisted backward as his body was slammed up against the side of the car beside him while the blood continued to spill up around his body.

"I try my best to use my career along with wisdom and to tell people-even angry people that have nothing left except for cynicism and the suffering that they used to be able to give themselves any kind of sense of identity that life and worth is about nothing but trying and trying again, especially when someone comes around and tells you that nothing that you do or anything that you are is worth anything and that there's nothing that you could do to change it. I try to get rid of their negative process, especially one that is jammed into people that are just as equally negative and full of their abrasive doubt that tries to corrupt other people along with them even if they think themselves better for their own personal cynicism as it relates to their personal identity of what they think they achieved. To tell them that at the end of the day that life is about nothing but constant effort and of trying and of trying again and even if you succeed that the only thing that is after that is more effort, and that human nature is inherently fair in the sense that as long as you put in the effort there will always be some reward, and that there's no reason to be able to get so abrasively angry to come from the belief of pain that other people try to put on top of you. But-"

His white ears perked up a little bit as each twitched as he indicated his head over to the dead man, as well as the man that was still alive whose arms are now crossed in front of himself into a pathetic fashion, his expression much of the same as his arms were crossed as he continued to talk over to the several different policemen that where standing beside him as they gave him several different questions while looking over against him with an equally inflexible mood.

"As you can tell, nothing is ever that simple, and very rarely do people ever have enough emotional wisdom to get themselves out of trouble and even less to be able to not destroy themselves. I struggle with it myself sometimes, but getting into the field and trying to stop other people has not been the relief that I thought it would be."

BoJack gave a slight sigh as he rolled his shoulders further while he raised at the suitcase up against the side of his hands, looking over at him with his ears splayed out as he did so as he tried as best to be able to find the window that he could get to crawl himself outside of the possible dark corner that he knew that he had dug himself into just from even coming out at the wrong time, much less from asking questions.

"Thanks for telling me, anyway." BoJack grunted as he placed both of the handles inside of his palms, tripping over his feet as he did so while he began to make his way down the street and kept his eyes focused onto the comfort of his topless red car in front of him. "I'll keep that in mind when I'm coming down and driving down the streets of Los Angeles. Probably will need it. With the amount of people like that, nothing new about it, but nothing makes it any easier. Thanks for trying, though."

"We would prefer for you to be careful out there on the road, Horseman."

The dog turned his head as he looked over at Bojack with hard eyes while Bojack abruptly stopped at his words, feet hitched in their movement as he paused. He turned his head over his shoulder as his expression treamored while he turned and watched the dog turned and gave Bojack a blunt flare of his expression of insistence.

"Uh-yeah. Sure."

Bojack shrugged lightly as he gave a slight hitch of his breath while he turned fully and looked over at the policeman, saw that he genuinely meant it as he offered him a hard glint that came up against his eyes that seemed as if it was further increased into an extent of a warning frown. He gave him a slight curt nod as he saw Bojack's worried, slightly uncertain eyes ease up over towards the dog as he threaded his hands up against the side of his notebook while he finished jotting something down in a frantic array of his focus, then gripped his hands up against it as he pulled it up against his suit and pulled it into his pocket on his chest. Bojack's eyes treamored and flicked down in frantic, uncertain thought, eyes darting back to the car but uncertain as to how much he would move forward without being scrutinized.

"I don't know what's going on out there lately, I don't know what is starting to make people act and to almost seemingly believe that they as if there is some sort of reason for their violence to be justify interrupting the violence that other people are jamming themselves into, but I do know that you have to be able to hold on to whatever it is that keeps you grounded. Most people do not have that, and as you've come to learn the same way that we are what happens when somebody does not."

The dog turned his body fully over to Bojack even as BoJack's eyes flickered downward while he stepped his way back, tense expression on Bojack's face as he stepped his way back while he gave another hitch of his breath as he tried to think of a response to the statement. There seemed to be a certain threat to the statement; as if the dog were trying to search for something underneath what he was trying to perceive from Bojack.

"Now I know you don't have the best reputation, and I am not telling you that you are suddenly going to have a good reputation to make my request comfortable, but whatever people that you have in your life who are concerned with you, make sure that you stay clung onto them as much as you're able to. Whatever brings you peace, stay on with it."

"I'm sorry." The muscles on Bojack's face trembled as he turned his eyes up to the dog. "What does that have to do with me?"

"There's a pattern with people who have been acting the same way that the pigeon man did tonight with the actions that he did, and there's a general conclusion and consensus that we seem to be coming down to as an authority that they all come from a space in their existence where it seems as if they are less than nothing. It might be part of the reason as to why they even feel that they can get away with this to begin with- not having any loved ones or anyone to go home to. I know for a fact that this man tonight seems as if he has no coherent traceable family or relatives or of anything similar. It's quite a pattern."

"Oh." Bojack's eyes turn downward in concern, his frown fully showing off his concern as he did so as he jolted the suitcase further into his fingertips, attempting to readjust it while he tried to collect his thought. His bottom eyes winced as he looked over to dog man, who offered him a hard flare of his eyes again of emotion while while he raised his brow and looked Bojack over; to some extent, he was clearly expecting a response from Bojack; a sense of reassurance in the narrative he had made.

Well, at least that makes a lot of sense, at least, right?" Bojack tried, eyes threading over the dog as he looked at him with tentative emotion. "At least they're not just doing it just for the sake of violence. That would be a sign of people really starting to-" He gave a slight uncertain breath as he turned his eyes downward, clumsily looking down up in front of the floor as he did so, currently painted red from the amount of the lights that were surrounding the front of the pavement. The gentle bother of the concern on his features treamored further as his eyes darted in somber thought. "-Do things like this for nothing, really. At least there's a direct reason for the terrible things that they do, anyway. Least it offers a solution. Doing it all for nothing, though; I think that would be a real reason to feel a lot of despair at the way people are."

The dog stepped a few paces to Bojack, almost seeming as if he was trying to look Bojack from the inside out; as if he could physically take a certain kind of assessment from him in the way he took him in and the answers he seemed to believe Bojack held. Bojack stepped back a few paces, feeling as if his own weakness was being turned from the inside out, his own fear, own black, and anger that he muddled on the inside on a day to day basis with the attempt of sovereign coverage for whatever little bit he thought it would give him for reasons he felt were more programmed from social wiring rather than from genuine want. As much as Bojack's guilt and unintentional violence and harm to others could be executed towards something that was really more so harmlessly innocent, lost, stumbling and soft toned, it was, nonetheless, harmful-but really more so in a reckless kind of way from his own end of his suffering, rather than something that was genuinely violent, much less with the intention of him even understanding it himself, and he felt himself turn in within himself as his ears lowered while he readjusted his hands up against the front of his suitcase, giving a slight breath as he did so as his eyes lowered as he kept his hand gripped against the suitcase beside him as he turned his head down and looked over at it with his ears lowered. He scratched the side of his neck as the somber grace of his consideration ease over his expression, graceful tension of his own cluttered thought easing through his headspace while he hesitated on an answer.

"Do you have any family, Horseman?"

"Family?"

Bojack's ears flicked up as a slight shock came over his features at the question as he turned his eyes up in a momentary thought as he did so; the question coming hard and fast in his direction, and as unexpected as in regards to it concerning him as much as it was an unexpected question to the situation.

Already did he know the answer, and even as he had said the word, he felt a different panic that overcome him. He turned his eyes up in a frantic thought as he tried his best to look as if he was thinking about the dense amount of answers and of options that could have been given that he knew didn't exist that only came from a void of lack of possibility.

"The way that I recall- I'm pretty sure that a lot of people around here don't end up with families. It's actually-pretty normal. And not everybody ends up imploding or gets into some sort of weird violent pain because of it."

His eyes turned back over to the dog in front of him as he gave him a slight shrug of his shoulder, as if he could have eased off the question, or the institution it suggested of poking and prodding the dog's clear weary suspicion of Bojack. Bojack's eyes flipped down up in front of him, ears lowering all the while as he did so with the somber consideration that was across his features as he did so.

"I think some people are just dumb, don't know how to be able to deal with it, that's all. I'm not sure why other people who don't have family should have to be able to be suspect for whatever it is that they did to have to deal with their inability to cope with it. Doesn't seem very..fair."

Bojack's words were far apart and drenched in uncertainty as he spoke; he was more afraid and nervous than he could let on. He had gotten in trouble with the law before, and every time had been unwanted; he could feel his heart quickening now, could sense the understanding that he had of the idea that because of his lack of control over his own issues, he was being drenched beyond recall in the wake of the wake of the law in front of him; fair or not, Bojack was weakened on a personal level that it was impossible for him not to be buried beyond recall from it almost instantly.

"No one to call? No one that you can easily tell something to to someone that you live with- or someone that would ever keep you grounded in life?"

This time Bojack gave the man a slide raise of his brow of his expression that came along with a slight jab of Bojack's expression that would suggest his own suspicion-a slight flair up against his eyes as he did so as he turned his head down over to the suitcase that rested in his fingertips while he readjusted it lightly for the sake of giving himself something to lean on for a moment. His eyes turned up as he gave him a slight pout of his tense expression, ears flown down.

"Emotions can be far more controlling and can fog up the simplicity of reality more than we may think they do, Horseman. It's no uncommon for people to get caught up in some grief, disorder, loneliness, to make them feel as if they have no choice but to burst themselves out in an implosive way that would make an otherwise simple life something terrible and fogged. People like you-as far as I know about you and you're isolated career-are usually suspected to get lost in their own headspace the worst."

Bojack's ears flew down, eyes wincing in their puffy insult.

"No, man. That's exactly what I'm trying to tell you. I'm not like that."

He gave us like hitch of his breath as he turned his head over towards the topless red car that was waiting for him a little bit away from the bridge, the side of the red lightning with the orange from the stagnant bride lights. He gave a slight breath as he rolled his shoulders in a reset, not trying to hide the way that he was clearly exalted up into the end of his own frustration as he readjusted both of the suitcases in both hands, and turned his head with a cautious and cut off flare up over to the dog as a last conclusion to the conversation. He kept his head turned to the side just enough so that he could make it clear that he had the intention of turning to his car and getting inside and riding home; the dog seemed to understand the general direction Bojack was trying to take the end of the argument in. The police's eyes turned down in thought, expression treamored as he seemed to be in that complicated lost thought that so few people ever understood or experienced in one another, if ever.

"Horseman, with the things I've hear-"

"Look, just, make sure that you just focus on yourself, okay? There's plenty of other people in this city that are actually causing problems and you don't need to start patting me down just because I was someone that happened to be in the same area at the same time. Please. For the sake of everybody, just do your job."

He turned around abruptly before he could even give the dog a chance to respond to what he said, his pupils small and dilated with his graceful somber panic as he readjusted his fingertips onto the side of the handle of the suitcases, and, as quick of a pace as much as Bojack could manage, he tripped his way to his red topless car, bottom eyes wincing at his own exhausted detriment that came along with his timid and devastated nature that he was feeling more than the dismissive air of the way that he had spoken to the dog that his natural dryness had allowed him to for the sake of protection took over.

His hands trembled against the front of the door as he gave a light hitch of a breath while he began to press his slick and trembling hands up against the car door, dropping both of his suitcases with a grunt as he began to grip his hands on the car handle while his stout fingertips trembled against it, eyes bulging as he gave quick and frantic timid breaths of his desperation to leave. The door opened with a swing as Bojack felt the lock of the car keys click, then slouched his way inside as he began to frantically start up the car with trembling hands, speaking to himself with low words under his tormented rasped breath as his hands slicked up against the controls of the car while he heard it start up with a rumble by his touch, the dim lights gradually turning on with a small rumble as the lights of his own car cut though the red siren of the police lights in front of him. The paranoia he suffered from when it came to the laws and the police pounded behind his mind as he started the car up with a rumble while he pressed on the gas, wincing as he turned his worried eyes over to the dense crowd of the policemen and the occasional watcherbyer that got out of their car to ask what happened.

He tried his best to calm himself while he fought the uneven tone of his breath while a sudden pounding within his senses began as he turned his frantic expression over to the car. With his hand slick up against these side of the wheel he pressed his foot abruptly onto the gas petal, hearing a quick sound of gas start up while his car began to lurch forward, and with his hands easing on the controls as he began to move the car a few paces he turned his back against the leather seat while his teeth poked out nervously, keeping his eyes away from watching the cluster of police beside the edge of his expression as he began to drive the car forward a few inches, grazing his hand beside the wheel as he turned his eyes over to the bridge, all with the intention of turning around to it fully and driving his way out.

"Wait."

The dogman began to turn over towards Bojack, and Bojack closed his eyes as he gave a slight swear and a hitch of his breath at the simple word thrown out, the muscle son his face trembling in tension.

Bojack's eyes snapped up as he turned his head over his shoulder as he looked over at him while he saw he fog rushing his way over to the cae, Bojack giving a vague swear under his breath as he snapped his eyes down in his abrasive insult. He gave a slight hitch of a sworn breath as he turned his melancholic eyes back to the dog as he rushed his way over to him. With a vague hesitancy, Bojack took to slowing the car down until it came to a full stop, though his eyes kept thick in their annoyance as Bojack snapped his eye to the side while his expression kept tense. He didn't turn to look at the the dog as he paused beside the car door, leaning forward to Bojack as he leaned an elbow onto the front of the window while he leaned his body against it, turning his head to the side as he looked over Bojack even as Bojack made a point of keeping his eyes turned to the bridge, the annoyance plastered across his features even as he felt the dog looking him over again for those answers he thought existed that Bojack could only hope didn't.

"Your girlfriend."

Bojack's ears flew down further, the annoyance sharpening on his features.

"I don't have a girlfriend. And any woman that is going around and trying to throw out the narrative that she is mine for the sake of trying to fill the void in her life of thinking that somebody loves her and knows her and cares about her intimately because we slept together one time is not my problem and I want to make that very clear, right now."

His eyes turned over towards the wheel as he gripped his hands up against it as he started it up again as a statement, hearing it roar all the while as he did so while he kept his eyes turned forward to the road.

"Ok, so-your ex-girlfriend." The dog shrugged his shoulders as he rolled his shoulders causally with a tilt of his head. Bojack could only feel the frown on his face furrow further, and he didn't bother to hide the deep edge of his frustration. "I don't know what kind of label you would ascribe to her, but it's irrelevant to the case."

"Great. So why are you asking me, then?"

The dog sighed as he turned his head over towards the side while he thought for a moment, rocking his head lightly, keeping his white elbow up eased firmly against Bojack's door and almost seeming as as if he was doing it with a statement that he was in control of where the context of the conversation was heading.

After a moment of thought-the dog was clearly trying to turn over in his mind the best way he could direct the conversation, and it was also clear he wanted to let Bojack know that he was the one with decided power in the conversation- he turned his head pointedly back overt o Bojack, and though it took Bojack a long moment of resistance, he turned his head in the direction of the dog, though he kept his eyes lowered in an extension of his exhaustion to make a statement to the dog that he wasn't playing along in the dog's idea of where the conversation should go.

"She said that you had taken in some strange, possibly homeless woman with you. Said that you had her with you for a little while because you were trying to be able to keep yourself leveraged with some kind of 'purpose' and she said that she thought it was harmless; but she said that since all this was going on that she figured that she may as well mention it. I think the reason why she mentioned it is because we're starting to suspect people that live alone or that have nobody for a suspect of crimes or if possible crimes are coming up, and I guess she wanted to clear your name to keep you from suspicion."

"Really." Bojack raised a brow as he looked up at the dog, and he gave him a curt nod as he met Bojack's questioning eyes, dry and tentative. "Huh." He turned his eyes down in thought, then gave a small shrug. "That was-thoughtful of her."

"It was." The dog's statement was blunt, seeming vaguely jaded towards Bojack's end, and causing him to wince from the edge of judgment from it towards his end; as if something to be done like that in regard to Bojack would have been surprising. "Look, I think we can both agree that human psychology isn't hard to understand, but that certainly doesn't give us or stop us from being able to make it seem as if we're completely oblivious to how to be able to handle it-if we can handle it at all, if anybody knows how to be able to handle it to begin with. All anyone around you is trying to do is to assure ourselves that we can make sure that this dosen't happen in regards to anyone we can keep our eyes on."

"She had nowhere else to go. She needed someone to turn to."

"Bojack, I get it. But it's strange behavior, a rich guy taking in some nothing nobody name of a homeless woman. Speaks of someone who is a little bit on edge in their life, and we can't afford to have people like that, you understand?"

"Yes. I get it."

Bojack closed his worn eyes, not bothering to hide his abrasive annoyance. The tension that overcame his worn muscles on his face increased along with the deepening of his wrinkles as he lowered his back beside the chair, hitched, conflicted light breath of his own exhaustion giving him an uneven emotion of his process as he pressed his palm against the front of his snout and pressed it down his expression while he tried to churn through the fog of his mind.

"Yes, I took in a homeless woman because I thought I could do something nice for someone who, as far as I am aware of, is innocent and has nothing to do with anything that has been going on lately in the world." He took his palm off of his exhausted eyes as he turned his lowered and hoodie expression over to the abrasive question of the dog, who was looking over him tentatively with a brow raised. "Is that all?"

"Be careful. Someone who has been homeless their entire life who hasn't had anyone to ground them or give them a sense of identity-especially if they're a woman; they have a tendency to have a certain kind of…eh, 'poetry' about them, the way they up their loneliness and their lack of identity, almost does if they see the lack of people who love them as if it's only an echo of a strong sense of self that they'll never have again because nobody has ever cared about them in that way."

Bojack's eyes flicked down, and a tension overcame his features as he glare slightly.

"Look, man-"

"I'm not even saying this for the sake of the law, but really just for your own sake, if you understand me. Do the best that you can to make sure that she doesn't grim you up into whatever it is that she comes up with, best in as much as you're able to. People who are low stay low forever, Bojack, and it's our job to make sure that we kep ourselves from getting dragged along with them."

He tapped his hands up against the front of the car door as BoJack's teeth poked while he glared at him , keeping his shoulders turned into himself as he slouched further into the chair. The dog began to raise his body up, giving Bojack an abrupt and curt nod, as if to indicate some wordless agreement to the end of the conversation. Bojack only slouched further within himself, hard eyes turning over to the dog as he lifted his elbow up from the top of the car door while he raised his body upward.

"Other than that, you're doing a good thing, giving one more unhinged and lonely person out there one less reason to do something like this, and we do thank you for that, as a law enforcement."

"Yes, I didn't do it for the sake of trying to to get a review about it from policemen."

Bojack reached out his hand as he turned the car onto full speed again as he abruptly began to start it up while he pressed his foot on the pedal, leaning his body back with vague reassurance when he heard the way that there was a slight rumble that came from the car while it started forward. Bojack began to feel a release of the tension of the scene as much as he was able as he gripped on the side of the wheel, starting it up as he did so as he began to drive his way down the front of the street, keeping his hand leaned and caressing beside the wheel while he passed his way by the dog, turning his focus over to the highway as he drove over to the start of the bridge. He didn't bother so much as even looking over to the dog or the rest of the police, but he could sense a change in energy as they ceased to come over to Bojack now or to even step forward, the majority of the ones who were left being people who were either suspects, or people who were talking about and analyzing the scene.

He was still aware of the red wash of the flash that came from the several different police sirens. Though Bojack had regained at least a vague sense of self resurrance from being now entirely away from the dog's eyes that were drenched in an ambitious superfciality, Bojack's hand were still slick with the nervous stress of sweat that was eased beside the layer of his skin while his palms ghosted across the wheel as he tired to get a sense of savvy smoothness to it now. The image of the man who's eyes had been rolled to the back of his head felt as if it was permanently burned inside of the back of Bojack's psychological state, and he could still sense the haunting horror that came along with having the flash of the open mouth and the rolled back eyes; an angered void of suffering that had imploded to destroy itself from the inside out; different from Bojack's pain that had been a different kind of torment where he imploded into constant profound senses of pain, but never enough for his heart to give out.

But he kept his hands up and against the wheel as he tapped his fingertips against it, driving his way down the street as he did so while he began to slowly drive his way home, lost up into a detach headspace of his fog and black thought as he did so. The large bridge, polluted with the stagnant yellow light and the wash of the neon light of red under the large structure of it., loomed against him as he began to drive his way down the street, the gas picking up every time he pressed his foot further on the pedal.

He had single intention of driving his way over towards a new hotel, and he turned and he tapped his fingertips over to the front of the directions on his GPS screen while the wind picked up and flashed across his mane. His expression was treamored and scrunched into a focus as he half drove, half flicked his fingertip over the screen while he began to look for a hotel room that he could hear from within the next few hours, flicking through the list and options while his other foot kept on the wheel, pressing a little faster with every movement. He gave a breath of a vague swear under his breath whenever he got a result that was anything less than somewhat cheap or within reasonable distance, and he could feel his exhaustion of his frustration getting the better of him while he continued to exhaust the majority of his resources through the few nearby within driving distance that showed up.

He gave an insulted breath as he turned his squinting eyes, partly from emotion and partly from the breeze as he continued to now speed his car down the street, keeping his focused turned over to where the bridge was opening up on the other side of the street that would force him to make a decision. against it as he continued to make his way down the street, his eyes turned up as he felt the abrupt a group of his breath as he did so as he kept his hands jammed up against the front of the extension of the wheel while he drove his way down the side of the street.

He turned his head over towards where he had his address permanently locked into the GPS as the car was driving its way across the bridge, snapping his eyes over towards the cheapest hotel room that he could get as he tried to ignore the trail of thought that was coming over his mind as he kept turning his eyes to the small white address that lead back to his own home. He tried to keep his hands focused on leading him to the road that would guide him in the direction of the various hotel rooms, his eyes snapping over the overpass of the architecture of the extensively large bridge near where the two men had begun to break out into the fight nearby, and as he looked over the black of the sky where there had been an implosive extent of the gold that had surpassed over the sky, he felt a vague uncomfortable connect between the two, and a surreal sense of edged forthcoming that came along with the observation of both on tha tonight.

Though he attempted to keep his eyes on the road, the extension of his frustration began to overcome him, his hands gripping tighter on the wheel as he gripped his fingers onto it, snapping his eyes over to the GPS on the screen as it sat in the corner of the screen as he felt with a vague foggy memory of what the dog had said, the flash of the two men that had shouted to each other that had made them exclude themselves as of they were a detriment of a complete void within themselves from whatever kind of lack of home that they had ever had that Bojack could sense the despair of just from the observation of them; he was loathe to admit it, but what the men stood for and what they were was of something that he had been in dread with of something he had been fighting for the longest time he could remember; some black void of despair that came from a lack of home or of love that he had had to spent every day thrashing to the back of his consciousness every day for the sake of keeping himself upright; but to fall into it entirely had almost always been too much of a temptation, horryingly exhausting as much as it could have been, to accept it in its entirety almost would have felt like a release.

He could feel the pounding of his own blood as he continued to let out an increased extension of his own uneven breath of frustration as he tapped his hands on the wheel and gripped it against his palm, eyes darting to the front of the GPS. His conflicted expression kept turning over to the roads in front of him as he car began to greet itself to the end of the road, and Bojack gave an abrupt jolt of his breath as his pupils finished dilating in front of him as he snapped his eyes over to the GPS. He let out a slight edge of a low rest a breath as he did as he snapped his hands onto the map in front of him with a sudden release, if only for the sake of attempting to dissuade some of the thickening tension that was crossed against his air.

Going back to your home on the top of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, California.

The monotoned, robotic voice of the woman spoke from the device as Bojack tapped his fingertip abruptly onto the screen, and it wasn't completely unlike the way that Bojack had felt in that dry, disconnected and inhuman fashion of when he had been talked down to by the dog, bein talked to as if he were an asset rather than someone who was genuinely worth or of even considered being listened to. Bojack was talked to like he was a number or status or an extension of money more than he was of anything that was even remotely considered human-the same way that he had been the majority of his life; first a nothing from before from his own kind, and then nothing but an asset and stereotype to those who would bother to even concern themselves with him at all once he had proven himself worth paying attention to.

He turned his head back as his his teeth poked while his hand gripped further on the wheel, and, while tapping his fingertips up against the leather of the wheel as the car began to turn abruptly to the side of the two way street, the green check mark lit up on the screen, waiting for his official confirmation to take him back and over to his house.

"Yes."

His voice was blunt and somber as he turned his head over to the night sky while the device gave a slight robotic chime at the confirmation of his request-one of which seemed as if it had a slight extension of a red tracing up against where there was the muggy black and purple as it sat within the clouds of the sky in the middle of the hue of the sky in the middle of the purple red of the melancholic light while he turned his tormented eyes up and over to the passing view of it.

He leaned his body fully beside the chair as he wincing and pained eyes eased over through the dusk of the sky, and his fingertips gripped further beside the wheel as he heard the robotic background of the GPS begin to offer him direction towards the area of where he needed to go.

He reset his headspace as much as his detrimental chaos and insecurity would allow him as he rolled his shoulders back and began to press his feet up against the gas pedal further, propelling the car over the bridge as he made the turn that passed him over to the rest of the closely dense and impacted buildings that surrounded his the small downtown area that accompanied the same place where the museum and its location was.

He slowed his foot on the gas pedal, the need to drive fast now beginning to deter now that he was both out of sight from the police and the party of them and their thick suspicion and the indescrive chaos of his indecision that had been haunting him before.

Despite the distance, and despite the fact that the museum itself had been quite a little bit away from his own house, the place of which had been his torment from the past few decades of his life, sewn and stitched into his identity, was executed up into such a large extension of isolation that even from the several miles of a distance that came between Bojack and his house,, through the clouds of the middle of the night could he make out the slight hill that waited for him on the other side of the street that he was now driving his way down.

Hs expression pouted as he turned his pained eyes up to where he could see the distant red and polluted husk of the clouds that made up Los Angeles as it fogged over the house that was sitting up on top of the several cliffs in front of the hill; a small vague and weak silhouette that seemed as if it barely even existed, large in its expanse, hauntingly stood on the cliff of which it stood on the edge, te clouds and the detriment of the foggy space passing over through the building and turning it into a distant and gray silhouette beside the sky and clouds. It was lifeless, one dimensional; and the place of where you were.

Bojack's dry and heavy eyes, puffy and laden into his curiosity, eased upward while he felt the middle of the child night pick up in its breeze, head titled up and over through the hills of the town and the dense town that would lead to the inherently separation of the rest of the town. He caressed his hand against the wheel as he slicked his palm beside the turning of it while he drove his way down the buildings, his eyes only stopping to turn to his cell phone now and then as the robot narrated to get home. He could have known how to ger there by himself at this point; but the soulless monotone of the robotic tone was the only thing that was keeping him sane-to have even just the stimulation of someone to guide him through the street that would take what was for the time being the hallowing of your absence.

He hadn't heard from you once, and he knew that he had made it very clear that he had no intentional interest in you doing so-but he was feeling the full thickness of his request now and especially in regard to the way that he had executed the abrasiveness of the request. He had pushed away the dense promise of what you were offering to him, and on the other side was the profound emptiness he knew far too well, and the thought of his heart giving out was a subconscious wish he felt demanding on the side of his mind daily.

His decision now couldn't have felt more leerring as he turned the car up the road, especially in that wordless abrasive rejection that he had given now towards the end, and the pain suffocating the extension of the decision he knew was one that you must have shared. He had spoken to you in countless ways that he wanted nothing to do with you, and he wanted to make it very clear that he was pushing you over towards the extension of his emptiness and making that fully known to yourself. He loathed what you made him feel because you shared the pain you did together and because you understood it, and going back now felt like the most extensive betrayal of that decision he could have made.

He kept his ear splayed back as he ducked his head underneath the front of his window to drive his way down the foggy street, hus hands gripping firmly on the wheel while dilated eyes drenched in emotion turned to the mansion now looming over him. None of the lights were on, making the house look especially dim and gloomy in its flat stark cloudiness, as unremarkable and as set in its mundanity as it came.

Bojack tried to keep himself calm: it seemed as if the night was beginning to make itself known as a particularly foggy and dense mood of the night, drenched in what seemed like a reflection of the decisions Bojack had made in regards you, and it was almost an eternal agreement of how he had made such a black destruction of himself and the destruction he had made. He kept his hands gripped up against the front of the wheel while he drove himself away from the the entrance that led away from the front to his neighborhood entirely, and as he felt the slight raise of the hill that lead to his house, he knew that he had made a set decisions not going anywhere.

He rolled the car up over towards the hill of Beverly Hills as he began to feel the familiar extension of the association that came along with the constant and profound isolation that made up the atmosphere, the amount of the profound and empty nights were there had been so many different nuances of the way that his brain had responded to the isolation that he had hardly even know how to be able to even describe them, much less comprehend them, even in memory. He only knew that the feeling of the loneliness of an entire universe relevant only to him taking him from the inside out as the torment of the reality had taken over him until it had felt like there was all was left, and for years had he lived with that princess without perspective of anything other than the profound black of a loveless life that it felt as if only he had ever experienced.

He took a large breath as his shoulders rolled down, the hooded and exhausted expression on his features flashing across his expression as he felt that anticipation and loathing with very little to any cause for bonding: the kind of dispair that felt as it it had only ever been experienced by him, the kind that never got easier, only dulled, and in regards to the amount of detail that came over him in regards to his dispair, the truth of the matter was that he knew that to an extent, it was true that it was only existed to himself.

"You're fine. You'll be fine. This isn't about you."

Bojack tapped his fingertips beside the wheel as he turned his anticipating eyes over to the front of the house, stacked up on the rocks that Bojack had been attracted to for the very thing that caused him torment now, a loathing thick disgust to even look at it. His ears splayed down as the full sickness of his anticipation came over him while lowered hooded and sickly eyes turned up, pupils dilating over the front of the building while he tried to overcome his physical movement with the sickness of his mind and thought.

He knew as somebody who felt he no longer knew how to be alive or knew how to understand about the way that he could carve out his own hope from a despairing life things into his own warmth that whatever small glints of islands he got was the best he could have hoped for-the only thing that he could have hoped for at this point of an increased extension of a jarring humanity that he felt had become increasingly more impossible to overcome as his life had become bleeker and less forgiving, and he had long stopped understanding where it came from himself and from what had been inevitable. It had stopped muttering a long time ago.

feeling as if in the middle of the detriment of his extent of the way that he had convinced himself to a tragic in long degree that there was nothing else that he could have done and that there was something inherently devastating and broken inside of him that would always lead him over to nothing but isolation, and the lifelong and impossible acceptance that came along with it that there would never be anything other than that, or ever had been.

He stopped as his car stopped over to the golden gate that sat in front of his house, gleaming against the front of the sky, and the gold seeming as if it was in contrast to the foggy extent of the night. Bojack's eyes winced as he got his way out of the car, leaning his palm against it as he stood himself up beside the car and looked over the gate, his initials coming to glare at him in its usual stoic cursive flare that was a signal to his previous decisions of anything he could have done in the past to make sense of the pain and of what seemed like the guaranteed emptiness that came along with being alive in the people he was with.

His eyes lowered his eyes started his way over to the gate, and although he had long since accepted since he was born the constant ache that haunted him and had been familiar with the feeling since he had been born, aching like an internal haunt, he still nonetheless felt like there was a certain kind of choking of emotion more profound than he knew what to do with that overcame his perception that extended from the life that was inside of the house; though there was no yellow light that would have suggested you were within in, Bojack could sense even just the dressing of the emotion that seemed only from you gleaming from the house.

The wind whipped beside his mane as he made his way to the gate that was now looming in front of him, and as he looked into the black of his house, a stark loneliness began to overcome him- that sense of never having really being seen as an individual despite having talked to so many, of having slept with so many people and having been left with nothing but himself in profound emptiness at the end of it all, the lack of belief that there could have been anything other to human existence that he personally had never known even as he had heard it from other people in small hints and the occasional overhearing of good conversation.

His hands beside his neck as he gradually began to make his way over to the gate that was waiting for him, eyes beginning to search for the button in the middle of the debris. His eyelids were hooded as he looked over towards the looming golden gate that was as pathetic in its attempt at trying to seem like something that was of ease or of importance like he had intended when he had tried to convince himself that it was an extension of how he felt- but he had long since seen it for what it was; a desperate pathetic attempt of a man trying to prove to himself to the majority that he was somebody, worthy of being known and worthy of being individual and detailed in his essence that would render him special and worth paying attention to in a way that was rare and barely given out; but the performance had never been close to nearly enough, just as it hadn't been when he had tried to convince you that emptiness was his preference. To live it in its full and detailed entirely was more than he knew what to do with; the heaving emptiness destroying him in the wake of its full presence.

And, simply, as all forms of human life were simple at their core; he missed you.

His eyes lowered as he began to ease his hands beside the debris beside his palm as he brushed the leaves back, eyes searching for the hidden button behind the bushes while he gazed at it with the gleam of his tired eyes. He waved his hands beside the leaves as the gate opened with a slight hum of a groan while he pressed it. He stepped his way backward, teeth poked as he looked up and saw the gates gradually begin to open as he stepped back, the electric groan of the gate greeting him while it turned forward. After a few paces of stepping back, Bojack settled for walking forward, hardly caring or even thinking clearly enough to even think about his car for the time being; he didn't consider much or care about anything other than to get to where he had left the wretched and small pathetic lost thing you were; and yet somehow with more humanity to you than anyone Bojack had encountered who had lavished themselves with the quick fast pace superficial nature of the world. The fact that you had survived this far and for this long in and of itself was a miracle; he didn't want to be the last reason why you were pulled over into the black.

"Hey."

Bojack began to shoulder his way inside the front door as he pushed it open, his voice somber with his emotional detriment and caution as he began to walk his way inside with a slight shove of his shoulder. His voice was edged with a vague caution of confirmation that he was searching if you were within the house; he could feel the general canopy of emotion you left behind from the small echos of life that you gave him that previously had passed by only like an imagined warmth in his mind before; something he had conjured up in his head as a brief passing moment of what he wa told life could be, but never experiencing it in reality other than cheap emulation of what he thought would give him that.

"Erika?"

He stepped his way through the living room, melancholic eyes turning over the living room as his fingertips played beside his wrists. His ears lowered as his eyes looked around the living room as he walked his way inside to the neon illuminated light of the pool, his pupils dilated as he made his way fully inward, teeth poked while he stepped his way over to beside the counter, then over to the porch; there was nothing but emptiness, with the distant sounds of the cars speeding by on the road and the distant minute sounds of the speeding by of the street and public spaces of the constant twinkling and lights of the city while the world sped through in its usual loud pacing.

"Erika?" His ears flew down, his body giving away to a tentative curiosity, shoulders easing inside timidly. "Are you asleep?"

His voice was trailing into an increased extension of insecurity as he spoke while your name hung in the air, his breath coming out frantically as his hands kept by his wrists. He had kept his luggage back in the car, as irrelevant as much as his subconscious had convinced him it was, the rest of the world falling away into much of the same irrelevance as he began to make his way through the hallway, neon pool illuminating against the living room while the blue drenched beside the countertops and the floor.

The one thing that he had brought was the silver cheap ring that Princess Caroline had abruptly given him, and he was playing with it in between his fingertips while his focus turned over to the open gray doors in front of him that lead to his master bedroom, his eyes dilating as he turned his head up abruptly to where he could hear a small turning of your body in the mattress, and all too easily and too abruptly could he feel that part of him inside that was almost like a little boy; lost and desperate, quite literally almost whining for love from that of which had been stolen from him; and along with it, almost an extension of what seemed like a demand of a pout for him to be able to get attention, and a neediness that had always been far too messy, far too flawed and too much of a burden to put up with for him to ever even consider opening up or even thinking of that side of him other than through impulsive misendeavours.

There was another raise of your body as you turned over the mattress, though it was small in movement has Bojck began to make his way inside, letting out a slight hitch of his breath as he did so as he made his way inward with his hand coming to ease open the door, the other fingertip keeping the ring beside his pads while he turned his head over through the cracked open door and ducked his head in, turning his eyes over you to see if you were awake.

"Erika?" His eyes turned gently as he looked over to your form curled against the gray sheets. "Is this a good time?"

He knew trying to get a respond from you would be fruitless, but the silence was almost an odd approval for Bojack to make his way inside, and he tentatively shoved his way through the door, breath hitched as he turned his somber eyes up to the ceiling that was drenched into that haunting extension of neon light of the lights of the city and his own pool that he knew all too well was associated with his own hollowing and unforgiving extent of the hours of living alone with his within his own headspace as the insanity of the hours passed by in his own specific exhaustion and hell of challenges, nothing in the reflection of the emptiness of people around him that, as far as he could tell, were people who were even aware of the wrong of the world; and Bojack had found himself at times envious for their ignorance, their own emptiness; whatever it was they lacked that made them apart of what destroyed Bojack, even as he had tried to play along with it in the hopes that the depression would abide one day had he played along as if he didn't feel the constant failure of Hollywood, of the world as a whole; and yet it had only deepend. The golden glint of reality that people around him either experienced in ways with each other where he himself only experienced emptiness, or that they were making up or ignoring the absence of entirely was of one Bojack had had to fight the constant pain of daily to the point of insanity; as he saw the small lump of your form curled in the bedsheets, your body and arms turned over the gray of them, and an endearment overcoming him seeing how you were on his side of the bed, for once did he feel the feeling subside in a way that was so profound that it seemed like the most tangible thing that Bojack could have ever hoped to overcome the emptiness; far more than unpleasantry ever was, and negativity had always felt like the only force in Bojack's life. Fo it to even be overcome for even a moment felt like a sign that he was in the right direction, uncertain and as terrible and unknowing as it was.

"Erika, I'm home."

He grazed his hand beside the bedroom door as he began to make his way over to the side of the bed where you lied entangled in the sheets, still keeping the ring eased onto his fingertips as he began to lightly walk his way beside the edge of the bed, the door, expression wet with emotion while he turned his worried and questioning eyes over your body; your face was pale and your hair was even more entangled than it had been before, and Bojck found that endearing as he felt his heart quicken; were his fingertips running up against the side of the ring while he kneeled himself down in front of you, eyes tentatively looking over at you with the ring squeezed in his fingertip, concerned frown eased across his features as he looked you over. You didn't move this time, but the serenity on your face was enough to make Bojack give a slight hitch of a breath as he looked you over while he felt an emotion tide over him more powerful than he knew what to do with; it was both bittersweet and devastating all at once- a life unlived, with enough beauty for him to feel inspired beyond what he could fathom, and enough beauty to make him wish that he had never lived at all if he had had to go even a moment with experiencing it.

"Thought you would be interested in the fact that the asshole who told you to go home might think about his own choices long term. Though I'm sure you've already had your own experiences more than plenty of just as equally stupid people."

You were a beauty; though people weren't so much what they presented themselves as, but more so what they lived and were, there was something about you that semed more pure and wise for the despair, rather than the something that was wretched for it. For all the constant abrasive uncaring cold of the world beyond what could even be comprehended, Bojack had never learned how to make it so that he had cut out his own personal peace from the chaos; rather had he been destroyed by it. For you yourself, you had been the opposite.

There was no noise, no sound of you showing any signs you were aware of him coming in or welcoming him in; and as he saw the sleepiness of your expression dress on your features, Bojack found he was glad for it. His vulnerable and marked, puffy eyes turned to the ring in his fingertips, turning it over his palms as he felt a slight nervousness coming over him. He turned his head up to where your cheek was lying beside the pillow, and with one hand did he reach forward as he caressed it beside your cheek, watching your face tremor with a slight twitch of his hand. There was something about you that was a complicated mantra of something that was challenging and resoundingly hurtful and almost devastating to Bojack; something about you that forced him to an odd entanglement of what he thought should be avoided, and yet as he looked more into the pain, there seemed to only be something that was demanding to be untangled; not because of hope of what he thought he could be for you, but despite it.

The terrible things Bojack had said and done, as he had assumed it was for others even as he had been the most affected by their own hatred especially when projected to himself, had come from an inner narrative of pain that was so intense and personal that it had been untouched and unseen by the majority to the point where he had felt as if another reality had been made even as he had tried to bring himself down from the pain; but there had never been anything but that waiting on the other side of it.

He turned his head over to the wide windows that were etched into the walls, looking over as the saw the looming neon lights of the city from the window that came from the profound loneliness and the nights of the surreal bittersweet of something that had passed over him throughout the nights and afternoons he had spent with his arms rested on the metal edge of the balcony alone. The pink blinds were pulled over them halfway for the time being, though it almost seemed as if you had kept them half open for a reason; there was apart of Bojack that was wistful that it was because there was a shared understanding of those long and exhausting empty days that they had both shared separately in the same town, but now with a thread of profound richness of shared experience that felt threaded with their experience they were sharing currently, and their experience together long before of an echo of something they had shared long before they had even known it.

As heavy and challenging as the city was in its day to day bittersweet enlightened life that extended further into loneliness from Bojack's end despite all the of the noise that had occurred daily, from the amount of black and long memories that he had had, he felt as if he could see nothing but the cracks of the beauty that you were both collectively sharing now, and he could see the kind of beauty and romanticism that could only come form the long extension of suffering on the way the world had put him through. He had tried to have a sense of self and grounding, but it had only ever lead to increased distraught; the world had never been bent on treating him as human, and as such neither did he to the temporary people in his life, and as a result, any humanity he had had been pushed and suffocated into the back of his mind while chaos had turned over in front of him, indifferent while he was let crippled over something that should have changed as easily as overnight, and yet didn't, because no one ever changed anything in any significant way, and Bojackhad no faith left for himself.

Bojack had reached out and had rested his palm beside your hips, almost as an afterthought, while he turned and felt the bittersweetness of his eyes keep focused on the window, a small serene pull of his lip on his expression. He felt your body begin to curl and move under his palm, and he turned his head as his ears perked up lightly while his eyes widened as he saw the way that your soft eyes gradually began to flutter open, the side of your red eyes gradually beginning to blink as you looked over at him while an emotion pierced over through the fog of your eyes; depthful, challenging and full of what seemed like an entire life that Bojack could always been to some degree had always felt existed; but had never even come close to allowing himself to even know how to begin to put it into action, especially being as easily lost and as tentative as he was and wanting to find and to follow somebody else who knew more than he did. He had only ever been left behind with nothing but indifferent suffering when he hadn't been able to figure it out and would certainly nobody had cared enough to be able to even know or to see what was going on inside of him, much less to help.

Although your eyes betrayed a gleam of surprise and almost a slight startlement came into your eyes as you fully took in the fact that Bojack was, in fact, kneeling beside you, It seemed as if it was lost underneath an guide of a foggy sleepiness, which then took over almost immediately after. Your body readjusted slightly as you reached out your pale hand and pulled it up against the top of his, a small tuck on your lip of what seems like a sleepy and a summered contentment as your fingertips lightly grazed across the top of his palm. Bojack couldn't help but manage a small raise of his lip as he looked over at you as a gentle ease into his eyes as he felt his temporary deep and profound black ache begin to lessen for at least a couple of moments into something certain.

"I was hoping that I would find you here, in my bed." He scratched the side of his neck lightly. "Even though I know that I made it very clear that I would have wanted you to be able to do anything else, but-you're much more emotionally in tune and than anyone else that I've ever met in my life. I'm not surprised you managed to put together the puzzle that I was giving to you when I didn't even know that I was giving it.

"Are you okay?" You asked it in a sleepy extension that seemed as if you were only half awake despite your surprise in the extension of your gratitude of Bojack's hospitality, and he found that endearing; he gave us a small chuckle as he kept his hands squeezed beside your palms while he did so while has e felt the way your and troubled underneath the side of his.

"Not especially," he admitted, and he could feel the emotional quality and the attention between the both you that seem as if it only was only beginning to come into an even richer emotional connection with the honesty that he spoke. "But I'd like to be able to think that it can be, for the first time, if I can only figure out how to be able to get from here to there. And, as always, how to figure out how to clear my head and to do it entirely alone and to actually have it be the right thing this time. Even though I know that-" He turned his head with concern to the sheets for a moment as his other hand gripped up against the front of the ring as he saw the way that it gently sat in his fingertips, the age on his face adding an increased endearing consideration to the concern. "-That's not really possible at this point in my life, and I also recognize how completely ridiculous it is for me to be able to expect for that to change after all this time where I keep proving myself over and over again that that's just the way it's going to happen. As in, badly."

"Why did you come here?"

Your head lifted up from the pillow a little bit as you looked over Bojack with that soft inquiry in your eyes as you looked him over, sleepy and welcoming. Bojack's pupils flicked in front of him as the muses on his face trembled as he gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. He was turning over his emotions on the inside as if it was a certain kind of storm, going from a complete block of doubt as to whether or not this this was the best thing for you- and whether or not it was what would push you both over the brink; or whether it had truly been the only right and the only good thing to do and that there was a chance that. maybe, for once, it would lead to something that almost felt as if it was something that was in agreement with the constant devastation of the emptiness of his robbed humanity that made it seem as if that existence was literally incapable of being able to give with something in return to have what would help make it make sense or to heal it in some way.

"Honestly- I just…felt it. In the same way that I decide to be able to just take you despite the fact that I knew for a fact that I finally had a plan that made since me and that worked with the way that I felt all the way and all the time inside, I decided to put everything on pause for my original plans of pushing you away and decide to be able to come over to see what happened."

You didn't say anything, but rather did you give a small nod, your eyes turning down and thought and he could practically see the amount of story that was within them, completely uncared about and unheard the way that it was with almost every single person, and as he watched you with that pain in his eyes he could begin to feel the pain of his own untold and uncared about story. no amount of fame ever could have changed human nature, and he had never really felt as if he had ever really truly been understood much less expressed to anyone in his life.

"Do you want me to get you a glass of water?"

A small, bittersweet smile grazed on your lip, cutting through what seemed like a vague exhaustion of your air that came from something heavy you had been grieving and carrying with you. Your pale shoulders readjusted beside the bed, turning your eyes up to Bojack as you gave him a ghost of a raise of your lips, meeting into the attempt of relief in your eyes.

"I don't mind whatever happens anymore. Do what you'd like."

Bojack instinctively gave a small raise of his lip while the gentleness of his expression met your eyes.

"Sure. Sure." His pupils dialed down in thought, and with a small squeeze and graze of his fingertips he eased his palms away from your hips. He gave a small grunt as he began to raise himself upward, expression lowering in thought as he looked you over while a timid consideration came over his disposition.

"Are you ok that I'm here?"

Your head turned up from the pillow at his words, and you gave a small breath of a laugh, bittersweet and reflective in the complication of your thought.

"I wanted to believe that you would come."

Bojack offered you a small raise of his lip, etching in gratitude as he turned his eyes down in what seemed like almost childish boyish gratitude.

"Thank you." He stepped his way to the door, then turned his head over his shoulder, ears lowered in an extension of complicated thought and timid ease as he added; "For letting me take care of you, I mean. After-"

He paused, eyes turning to the side as he gave a slight hitch of a breath of thought, the grace of his face furrowing in insecure consideration. You began to raise your body up from the mattress, sitting up, red plush of your cheeks easing beside the pale of your face as you gave him a small nod, gentle ease on your features as you met the uncertainty of his eyes while he darted his expression back to your own bittersweet one, peaking through the neon light.

"I know."

You spoke it softly with a guide of permission of what Bojack was searching for. His eyes turned up as he met your expression; the wretched sleep deprived ease of the softness in your eyes that he was sure had more pain to them than you would let on.

With a certain strike of emotional force that seemed as if it was striking into his headspace with a force of demand, in a bittersweet and profound ease of grief from how human it was that forced Bojack to confront how long he had been living without it, he remembered how only a few nights ago, your bodies had been raised up against one another, your fingertips threaded up against his mane as you curved your fingertips beside the threads of his mane, soft trembling of your own tone that came along of your curiosity of intimacy with him while he felt your breasts guide along the plush of his body, and it was only the hitch of Bojack's rasps that had been what he could give you from his end as he had felt for once like he didn't care what happened; not in the terrible and terrifying meaningless way he knew all too well, but rather that of what was where something about his existence and the meaning of it had been revealed to him that was so deep, so clear, and so needed that he no longer felt the weight of confliciton of worrying about anything other than having what you were giving him.

Your hand had eased with a tremble against the back of his mane while he had allowed himself that release that had come from constant tension previously where he hadn't allowed himself to simply fall; it was an odd acceptance of himself that he previously hadn't allowed himself, and what other had tried to only take from him. It was the feeling of allowing himself to feel free and as someone who was precious and poetic, worthy of being treated in such a detailed and slow way that he never even could have imagined, much less could have believed in or have felt in a way that genuinely suppressed the black of the pain that would have made him suffer previously-that had destroyed him.

Throughout his life, he never would have accepted anything other than that interpretation of the way that he felt about his existence; black, inhuman, superficial, foggy and quick in how the days passed, treating the days as if they were some punishment he felt he desered with no hope for anything deserved of better. But on those nights, when you would take his palms in your soft, trembling and bony body that had been told for everything that it was worth that it was less than nothing even more than himself, trembling and wretched within itself and seeing as if your eyes had become wretched with years of pain that were less than respected as human even as the pain that you filled was ironically far more human than that of the sentence of existence of what people had thrown out to you, had there been a gradual understanding between Bojack and you that there was a gradual bond that came along with two people who had long since been taught that their souls were cheap, less than nothing-that there was nothing going on between either of them except for the detriment of complete emptiness of being used for everything that they were. There was a rhythm of everything that anybody else who had ever been told much of the same and who had been small and forgotten even for themselves, tormented and rushed and tumbled from the inside out until there was nothing left of them and until they had ceased to be able to see anything about themselves that would have been able to be to the contrary. He had taken that route to a destructive and devastating degree, to the point where it was fatal, as had you.

He had long since taken that narrative so much to the point that it had physically showed itself onto the wear of his expression, and there hadn't been a reward even in that capacity, but rather instead had a chip away at himself, another sign of a human soul that had convinced itself by its very own wretched kind, the most wretched species in existence, that he was anything but, and that there was no tragedy even to be had of it, that it simply was as it was, and the pain relevant and of a loss to no one but himself.

He had long taken that narrative until there was nothing left but the pain and he absence of perspective or of anything that would have made him feel like himself, and as it was so believed it became everything that was true, and he had barely been able to take in at first the way the narrative of something so rich and so demanding of an opposite narrative that his heart could have given out from feeling it from the force of yourself, pressed up against him in a way that caused him to see the endless nature of perspective and emotion; something about your belief in him that had caused him to achieve the understanding that emotions and the human headspace was endless, that the abuse of people were flawed to a comical degree, and something about you had given Bojack permission to fully and unapologetically fall into his entire humanity.

It had only been after a couple of soft, tossing and easing teasing that came from his breath and from the way that he spoke to you, with a soft mumbled tone of his rasped words as his hands had allowed him to gently thread up against you almost as if it was a war in this agreement of acceptance and narrative that you were giving him as your hips pressed up against his own, as he stepped his way back and allowed his lips to press with knocking knees up against the invitation of your own as your body threaded up against him while breasts pressed up agaisnt the front of his body, and it was there against the reflected blue refrigerator in the middle of the ease of the quiet night that he gradually begin to feel the way that his hand started up against yours as he begun to accept it-and even more so as his head had turned back while he allowed his neck and his mouth to begin to open as he felt the way you threaded yourself up against his body, permission of layered permission for him to unravel and to allow himself to be as he was and to fully believe and to feel it was enough; rather than the mold of other beliefs he had carried to a tormented degree that had never done anything to change who he was regardless, but had only served to take him away further from himself, and all for passing and nothing perceptions of other people.

Bojack found himself focusing on the edge of your supple lips, the same ones that had kissed him on the neck, and although it had been kissed and had been cradled in an amount of times that Bojack couldn't even be bothered to remember with the amount of other woman that had done the same, and although there have been plenty of times when he had allowed his body to be cherished and had been drenched in compliments well enough, they had already seen the action as if it was more so a technical achievement for the sake of an impression for a world that had assured them they would never be enough-just another thing that was full of nothing except for a complete detriment of a chief dance of something that had very little oral of actual genuine way to it, action without heart, so much to the point where Bojack had wondered if it were even possible for anything to have heart; if it had ever existed at all.

His head had been turned back as he felt the way of your body trembled against him as he continued to allow the chubbiness and softness of his body began to undress itself into the full extension of his own melancholy as he began to feel a genuine richness that overcame from the belief of what you gave him-something that for once felt as if it was good that was just as tangible as much as much as any bad thing that anybody had ever spoken that he had believed without even a second question, and if anything he had taken as a certain kind of understanding of reality from other people that was beyond t anything that he would have been able to comprehend himsel, much less to believe in within his natural cynicism; and yet on that night, with the neon light threading up against his body as it had pulled up against the both of you as his body had been pulled back while you had made love to him, your hands trembling beside his skin and gently whispering your soft words to with a genuine sense of a true blessing of being able to love on him, and his eyes turning back as he felt the way that he gave the hitch of his breath of his disbelief as he felt the way that your body threaded and made love to the side of him on the side of the fridge.

The both of you had been turned back into the understanding and acceptance of the distance of separation between the life of that of what you would both had previously compared to understanding of empty reality compared to what you had now, and for once it was hope, rather than an extension of increased dispiar, such as the way it had been with him in the past of his life.

He had whispered your name as he had turned his head up and allowed his chubby hands to thread up against your back, and in that moment, he had known what feeling full was, and had accepted feeling full within its entirety, his body stumbling up against you as he had allod himself to be overcome with your intertwining and acceptance of his own essence, layered and melchcolic, weakness of a devastating unheard life from both of your words admitting themselves through his whispered words and hands trembling and his voice hitched-but ultimately with a complete detriment of understanding about a surrerality of blessing that overcame him up on understanding now that there was something human that couldn't possibly be denied of the blessing that came along when he was focused on the fact that you were with him; he could feel that your belief in it that was so deep, and such a rare thing was belief was as Bojack had come to find within the world of what he lived in with it and within his time, and other general genuine sweetness that you had, that it carried him into an extension of a complete and absolute focus and of belief in the moment; the sweetest thing of anything that he had ever come to being able to know,-and, as it turned out, the only thing.

BoJack had a sense of gratitude for how simple life was, even though the majority of the time within his life had left him impossibly empty and fighting a heaviness that ironically made the simplicity feel as if it was the most complicated and the most detrimental to any slight happiness of spirit. But through simplicity had he had the emptiness and boredom to discover who he was; he had, through being forced to know who he was, found the core of who he was to carry him through life, and previously where there had been nothing but emptiness where he wished could have filled the void of where he had had the wisdom to realize what he was was there now a person of life to give sense to the emptiness.

"Were you-planning on staying?"

Your smile raised a few more movements further up on your lip, this time seeming even more authentic as it glistened in your eyes while the burning of your cheeks met Bojack's expression red emotion more compact of life than Bojack felt he would ever know from anyone again, oddly devastating seeing how compact it was in your eyes.

"I wasn't planning on much of anything. I was just..trying to survive and to think things through. It's the best thing of what I know what to do."

"Oh." His eyes turned down, ears lowered, light shame of thought on his features. "Right. Sure." A small shrug. "Makes sense. Must be what you're used to."

There was a pause, and your eyes didn't leave Bojack's once.

"I'm not used to anyone returning, I'll tell you that."

His eyes winced while ears flew down as he felt a black stab through his attempt at confident air at your words; he knew there was a layered amount of genuine truth within them, a lifetime of experience that he felt in tune with on an emotional human level even as his road to experience had been so detrimentally different in the way it had been dressed up.

"You know-" He gave a soft breath as he began to step his way to the door, more for his own comfort than anything else. "-I know it feels like you're the only one who has been as low as you have. But it's not your fault, none of it, and the fact that you're even here shows how good you are at keeping yourself alive despite everything that I'm sure you've suffered through. So-don't blame yourself. People like me have had a million times more reason to be miserable, and haven't had half of the amount of terrible luck you have. You have a strength, resilience, and you shouldn't see that as something to be ashamed of. As a matter of fact, that's only a sign you should be even more proud, because there's nothing harder than someone who is resilient when they're being told at every turn that they shouldn't be."

"What was it for, though?" The bitterness on your features now was not beginning to etch through like cracks through your natural sweetness, and Bojack was aware, to some degree, that it was because he had devastated you with his action. "To suffer for nothing, when it could have been ended so much sooner?"

"Uhm-" Bojack's voice was somber as his eyes turned to the side, ears lowered as that melancholic uncertainty came across his features while he stepped his way back. "Right. Just-stay there. You don't need to worry about-anything. Just enjoy this." His eyes lowered in emptiness as tha genuine reflective regret eased across his features. "Please. For both of our sakes. I need to believe that there's something I can do for someone for once.

His ears lowered as he began to make his way over through the front of the door as he spoke your name lowly again before he left through the entrance, as if there was something else he could come up with to convince you of anything, but he felt any other thought or attempt dying on his lip when you took in the exhaustion of your features and the heaviness of story behind it.

His hand trembled beside the doorknob as he kept his eyes on you in guilt and for some desperate sense of comfort, trembling his hand beside the door as he pushed his back on the door and began to stumble out, and your eyes eased down while sickly hands gripped onto the sheets.

He gave a soft swear as he walked his way to the very same fridge that held the same amount of memories you shared as he walked his way around it and over to the cabinet, head turned up as he gave a soft hitch of a breath and eased his hand on the cabinet and began to thread his hands clumsily beside two tall water glasses.

The glass clanged beside his hand and he gave a swear as he swayed himself back hearing the class clang against one another, his ears flown back as he stepped his way backward while he saw the slight jarring tumbling of the glasses. His eyes darted over to the bedroom door of where you were as he waited for any sign that you had heard-when there was nothing but silence, he gave another swear as he turned his head to the open cabinet and grabbed two glasses, giving soft hitches of breath as he did so while he pulled it out and pressed one to his chest while the other balanced in his hand. His eyes widened as he gave a frantic breath and tried to keep the glass balanced in his hand as he clumsily looked over the glass and kept it balanced in his hand and the other in his arm, took several layers of intense breaths, then settled as he turned to the door of your bedroom after filling them both and shouldering his way back inside.

You were lying down again, your body bundled under the sheets while you were furled into yourself on the mattress. He turned his way to the open door as he eased his hands onto it, turning it shut, then giving a hesitant breath of his lip as he turned and looked over where you were settled on the bed.

"Erika?"

He turned his head to the side as he looked you over while he walked his way around the bed, turning his eyes over your body that was buried under the sheets; nothing except for the soft rumble that came from the air conditioning from the technicalities that was in the bedroom giving leave to anything but rumbling silence of the bedroom.

He ducked his eyes down as he looked you over, ears split out as he did while he kneeled himself to the front of the edge of the bed, threading his hands against the sheets as he tried his best to have a genuine belief that he belonged and that he deserve to be able to see you and to know you, that the guilt of that of what he felt that was the constant conviction that he didn't to see himself as something that was pushed over to the side, deterred and unwanted once entirely known.

He shouldered his way down with a grunt as he placed one large glass beside the table, thought it over, then placed the other glass onto the table, turning his eyes to you while he kept his expression darted between the lampside table and yourself on the bed.

"Erika-" He cut himself off, and that soft, somber way he spoke eased into that emotional tenderness of his voice that he possessed so easily when he was truly in debt and of want of respect to someone.

Your head was turned back over towards the side and your hair flew around the pillow around yourself and completely entangled up against your hair and around the side at the end of your shoulder. It was clear that you were fully immersing yourself in the sheets and the entanglement of the- in the way that someone who normally only had torment and emptiness usually ignored or not understood by the majority would fully immersed themselves as someone who had accepted their finite existence and now enjoy the full gifts of things without guilt.

He gave a soft hitch of a breath as he placed the other glass onto the table beside the other, eyes glinting with melancholy as he sat himself down in front of you, legs entangled while he looked you over, ears lowered and teeth poking in his emotional confliction.

A pout eased on his expression as his ears kept back that came along with tense uncertainty, and with stout fingertips easing beside his palms did he hesitantly begin to raise his uncertain hand to where you were lying. He spoke your name again as softly he did so, and yet there was nothing except for a soft light of indifference and quiet that was surrounding you as he spoke your with that somber ease of a layered and questioning tone, the name spread up into nothing except for the quiet that was hanging up into the air. He was glad for it, and he tried his best to remember all of the ways of that of what you offered him in a certain kind of extension of natural knowledge that you had given him-the idea that in the quiet for as long as he believed and for as long as he allowed himself to be able to believe that this time in the quiet there was not just nothing, but a different way of being able to have a sense of belief and of believing in it.

As his stout fingertips began to untangle from your palms and eased beside your hips, he found himself calling your name again-but this time even softer and even more with a sense of somber ease of edge of question as he kneeled himself down in front of you and leaned forward, giving off soft minute breaths while he looked you over.

The pale of your eyes were worn and wrinkled as they were closed and lost in sleep, muscles on your face treamoring in their tumbling of thought and dreams as Bojack could see the way that your eyes were rolling behind your eyelids within your secret dreams; you must have been exhausted to fall asleep so quickly.

He began to feel that same sense of that sentiment of that rich grounding that he felt that he had never even quite known existed, much less could feel to the extent of the way that he did now as his eyes winced as he looked you over while he felt the way that his breath poked up out from his lips within his unknowing as he looked against you with his eyes running up your expression and into his melancholic exhaust of his own question; ears lowered as he did so while he looked you over as he dared to reach out his hand further, threading it up against the side of your cheek as he felt the way that he gave a soft edge of a breath as he did so while he looked you over, breath hitched and labored while he allowed the tenderness of the moment to come over him.

Your body rolled slightly in the wake of how he was easing his palm over your hips, his fingertips up hesitating against you as he kept the other hand playing with the ring that he took out of his pocket, turning it over in his fingertips as he kept his hand hovered beside your hips, turning the ring in his pad as he felt it respond to his fingertips, looking over you as he felt the way his fingertips gradually threaded and eased against the meta and carresedd it against the front of his fingertips all the while while he looked over at you and felt the way his heart was quickening in its sickness that was beginning to overcome him even further as he looked you over, on the verge of his torment that was stayed by the observation of your gentle expression, and he could see how clearly you were lost not only bad dreams, thoughts, or of some sort of consciousness that would have led to something that was somewhere in between those things in its murky depth of challenge and of revealing what was fully going on inside of you.

Though you were at least half asleep, switching in between thought to thought of anything that would have concerned itself to you and its genuine detriment of reality of whatever it was that Bojack was assuming would come next within the devastating extension of one challenge and over to the other, there was small bits of serenity of your features now and then between the tension.

"Erika."

He spoke the name slowly now as the emotion of his expression eased up into a melancholic observation of your disposition, turning his eyes through the details of your pale expression while ears downward as he did so while he felt the way that his own breath was coming out hitched and labored in his desire for you.

Your hand was gripped beside the grey sheets, and Bojack felt a sharp tension flash through his body as he observed you; and then a soft ease of appreciation and of that same eternal softness that passed through him as he relaized you were reaching out to him in any way you could, even as he had rejected you. Even as you were lost in your conflicted tension, Bojack could feel the air that was surrounding with your welcome towards him even as he had done everything to side step it, just as he had done everything to try and deny himself the burden of a meaningful life after having to break himself from the inside out to become a master of his emptiness.

He closed his worn eyes as he gradually begin to raise himself up from where his plush body was sitting beside you on the edge of the bed, gradually easing his hands on his knees as he got himself up and began to stumble his fingertips onto his shirt, giving vague soft breaths and swears as he began to take his shirt off of his plush stomach and pulled it over his head, tossing it to the ground as his plush hips sat beside the edge of it.

His body slouched as his dim eyes turned over to the cheap metal of the ring as he continued to turn it in his fingertips, eyebrows raised as he looked over with a lack of impression the chipping that dressed itself around the worn metal of the ring as he agave a soft vague of a bittersweet breath while he titled his head to the side and continued to turn the shining of the metal in his fingertip, wincing as he took in the ring's presence. It was as cheap and as unremarkable as it came, and exactly what Bojack would have expected for Princess Caroline to give to him in regards to any small good she could have seen in his life.

The thickness of his consideration was interrupted, and his eyes widened as he turned his head over his shoulder while he felt the thin edge of your hip hit beside his body, still so thin and so bony that he still couldn't quite comprehend or even believe that it came from you in terms of the power if its insistence.

"Erika?" He turned his head over his shoulder fully, plush stomach turning along with him as he winced while he looked you over as he saw your eyes peeking from your hair. "Are you awake?"

Your eyes flashed through the dark as he saw your face turn up to meet the questioning of his eyes, flashing and being traced by the reflection of the light that came from the blue square of the outside. He was amazed that he was able to handle someone as yourself, someone as you that was so naturally tender, broken, fragile=something about you that seemed to hold a certain kind of purity that he would have thought of himself far too corrupted or bad even dreamed to be able to come into into extension with, much less to be able to be as associated with as much as he was now.

"I'm sorry." Bojack's ears lowered, genuine somber regret flashing in his eyes as he indicated his expression over to where the two glasses were sitting beside the table. "I got you some water, if it helps you at all in regards to the whole…making the most of this thing."

You got yourself up as you sat yourself upward, and Bojack's ears lowered as he abruptly shook his head.

"No. Please. Go back to sleep. I'm sorry. I didn't know if I should come in and try to talk to you or if I should just let you have the bed for the night, but, clearly…"

He began to raise himself up from the edge of the bed, ears lowered and splayed back as his eyes turned down in an ease of thought that suggested shame. But your hand reached out and gripped beside his wrist, and his eyes widened as he turned and felt your palm grip beside his wrist.

"Please." Your finger gripped further beside his wrist as you gave you a soft wince of his eyes. "Stay."

"Are you sure?" Bojack began to ease himself back onto the side of the bed, gazing at you with soft somber question, though already was he sitting down with that wordless agreement you both shared that there was an understanding that the both of you had come to agreement that this was wanted. It was more than that.

You indicated towards the ring he had placed in his palm, and your hand didn't leave his wrist. He found that he enjoyed it as his wrist fully eased back into your palm again, the stability of the feeling of your hand around his wrist as it limped into it was one that gave him a full sense of stability.

"What is that?"

"What?" When he followed the direction of your eyes his ears lowered, wincing as he looked over the metal ring in his hand while he looked it over. "Oh. This was-just something that I found on the way home, is all." His eyelids lowered as he looked the cheap metal ring over. "Not much. It was just something the woman who drove you home gave you." He paused as his eyes eased in front of the ring in thought, then turned his head over his shoulder while met the insight of your tired eyes. "Was she good to you, at all? Driving you home, I mean."

"Princess Caroline?" You raised your body up further as your eyes turned down to the sheets, gripping the sheets in your hand as while you gripped and played with them in thought. "It's hard to imagine you being with someone like that."

His heart quickened, and he felt something pip up in his attention as he felt the question ease out of his curiosity; "Someone like-what?"

"Sharp. So caught up into the world and of what it is."

"Meaning..what, exactly, about me, then."

Your head tilted up as you met Bojack's exhausted and puffy expression.

"You're so gentle. Emotional. Fragile. I couldn't see you trying to get along with someone like that without being destroyed."

"No?"

"In a soft, secretive way-one that maybe you wouldn't even be aware of. But you would certainly feel it." Your eyes sharpened in their focus as ou pushed the rest of the blankets away, eyes gleaming with curiosity as you looked at the sharp metal placed in Bojack's fingertips. "She gave that to you?"

"Well-not gave it. That's not the right word. She, uhm-" Bojack winced in considerate thought while he looked the small thing over. "She found it on the side of the street. Said she wanted to give it to me to see what it would 'inspire' out of me." His voice lowered into a slightly more somber ease of his tone as he spoke; "Found it shortly after she dropped you off, actually."

Your eyes glinted in curiosity as you edged yourself further behind Bojack, and though he tensed feeling just how close you were to his body, your chin rested with a soft acceptance on his shoulder, and though he felt himself buckling under the relationship and chemistry of your body and the codes coming from the disposition of your air, he felt his body relaxing further against your touch.

"It's beautiful."

"Have you-ever seen anything like it? In all of the time you've been out on the road, I mean."

"A few times." Your pale arm reached out and grasped around Bojack's hand, and he gave a soft breath as he felt your hands, clammy with sweat, ease around his hand while you lifted his palms along with your and put it on eye level to your expression as you looked the silver ring over. Bojack's teeth poked as he watched your ease your fingertips beside Bojack's hand until he released it for you to take, and you pulled the ring to your chest as you reflected it against the blue that came from the outward window, curling yourself into the sheets as you did so as you turned the metal over in your hand.

"It's yours if you want it."'

Bojack spoke the statement with a blunt ease, and your eyes snapped up as you meet the soft insistence of his eyes while you kept the silver threaded through your palms. Something on your face paused at his suggestion, and he only gave a soft reset of a breath as he sighed, leaning forward and taking the ring from your fingertip as he began to raise it a few inches from where it hovered above your palm, fingertips shaking as he felt a film of sweat ease around his skin while he hovered the ring over your hand.

"Can I?"

His eyes were tender and vulnerable as he turned his eyes up to met your own, disposition somber and full of that quiet question, body frozen as he leaned half forward. You nodded, soft bumbling invitation in your expression, and Bojack's eyes darted down as he began to slip the ring against your finger, breath coming out with a ease of his uneven breath as he began to slip the ring on your finger, which he took by balancing it with his other fingertips while holding your hand beside his embrace.

He slipped it on as he gave a soft grunt, then winced as he eased his body back while you raised your hand up to your eyes, turning it around your vision as you looked your pale hand over and admired, in your own soft quiet observation while you watched the way the ring sat on your fingertip.

"What were you planning on doing with it?" Your eyes blinked lightly as you turned your head up to Bojack in question. His eyes darted to the side as bottom eyes winced in thought, tentative and uncertain while ears lowered further back.

"Honestly, mainly I was just doing it fo the sake of trying to appease my ex girlfriend." He winced as he looked over the ring as you turned it over your fingertip, leaning back as he saw your fingertips threading beside the cheap silver metal. Something in his eyes lowered into a soft edge of a dim while he watched the silver thread beside your fingertips. "Not too much of a profound reason, as almost nothing that I've done now is."

"I like it."

Bojack chuckled, lightly and nervously, face furrowing in twisted surprise as he winced and looked you over.

"What, the cheap silver metal from the side of the road? I know your standards must be different from mine, but even that I wasn't expecting from you."

"Not just the way it looks."

His expression sombered in curiosity.. "No?"

"It reminds me of a lesson I've learned in my life-something that turned despair into something that I realized could be a tool. My humanity was incapable of being taken from me-of course it was. No matter what the world took from me, it couldn't take away the natural equal balance of things inside of me. It couldn't take away from the fact that even if everything was taken from me, even if the world was determined to cast me aside and treat me as inhuman, even the deepest black and loss would eventually lead to some balance of regain at some point; even if that gain was breaking down and not having to live according to the inhuman punishments around me. I thought my biggest fear in life was to be disregarded, lonely, to have no rights as a human being; but it turned out that my biggest fear was to have all that happen, and to somehow continue going forward in inhuman conditions until I myself became inhuman." Your head tilted to the side as the gleam of the ring met into your eyes, full of life, bittersweet as they were with the long hours and days of humanity deprived of being treated as such. "But it's not possible. You can't take away humanity from a human being. It will just be destroyed."

Bojack's eyelids lowered as his dim eyes turned to see where you were turning the silver ring against your fingertip, hands placed beside his legs as he kept his stout body beside you.

"Well-" He gave a dim breath, and your eyes turned to him as he kept his expression lowered to the ring. "It's yours now, if you want."

Something released in your eyes as your kept your expression turned onto the ring, fingertips threading beside it as you looked it over. Some of the silver was chipping from the ring, and your fingertip eased against the side of the cheapness of the material, eyes glistening in thought.

"Can I stay here?" Your eyes closed for a moment as you spoke the request, and there was an eevn further odd strain on your features as you did so, as if you knew you were overstepping your boundaries. You breathed in without opening your mouth with the strain that came along with the question, then gently fluttered open your eyes while you gazed at Bojack somberly.

"For the next few days? Or-" The muscles on his face were cramped and somber as his eyes darted to look over your expression as you opened your eyes lightly, then offered him a small nod, your fingertips still threading beside the ring, fingertips nervously grazing beside the ring. Bojack's eyes turned down as he watched the pattern of your hands, and he felt his heart quickening, understanding to some degree that of which you were suggesting.

The timid exhaust eased in his eyes as he turned his eyes up to meet yours, ears lowering down.

"Listen, Erika, uhm-" His hand raised up beside his chest, hand cramped as he gazed at you tentatively. "I know that you have a lot of wisdom. And you've done and been through so much to get to this point, and I admire that. You deserve so much more connection than what you've gotten, and I'm not denying that. Your misery and pain is valid. But I can't-" His words were abruptly stopped as he gave a soft hitch of his breath, turning the ease of his wet eyes down to where you were keeping your fingertips threaded beside the ring as you turned it.

"Bojack, please." You leaned forward, and Bojack's timid, apologetic expression swept across his expression as he turned his body back, pout painted across his features and drenched in his complex emotional uncertainty. He could hear the wordless question of what you were speaking; and even more the insistence of it, and the worst part was that he understood it well enough to draw to it rather than away; to turn away was the extension of devastation, and his fear and the exhaustion of his tired heart loathed that. "This doesn't need to be a bad thing. Everything that has happened to us, everything that continues to happen. It dosen't have to be for nothing."

He leaned his stout body back, until he abruptly began to raise himself up from the side of the body and stumbled his way back, hands gripped beside his stomach while his expression tensed into a defense while he stumbled back. He gave an abrupt hitch of his breath as he felt his feet hit the bedside table behind it, turning his eyes, rich with emotion, over to the side as he heard the lamp shale behind his misstep.

"Listen-" His eyes were drenched in exhaust as he turned his eyes to you, ears lowered. "I understand what you're saying. But sometimes the answers don't seem like what they seem like they are."

"The only way through life is to fight for yourself and who you are, or to die. Either way, you'll be released; but I need you to agree within that, and I know you do."

"I-uhm-" Bojack's hands were clumsy cramped beside his chest, and he stepped back further on instinct; he gave an abrupt hitch of his breath as his ears perked up, eyes snapped over his shoulder as he watched the lamp turn again, a pathetic apology and intense uncertainty threaded into his eyes as he turned his expression back to you. "I don't think you know what you're asking for."

"Do you?"

"That's the thing! I never do. I don't-" He paused as he gave a shaky breath, and he turned his eyes to the side as a genuine regret overcame tired worn features. He gestured to you with the light apology on his expression as he spoke with a more somber tone; "You've made it this far. There must be some kind of flexible perspective that you hold that most people don't. Some type of endurance or extra form of life-and that's not a bad thing. God knows that I wish I did."

You paused, and your lips pressed together as a pale regret entered your eyes while your body tensed.

"Do you want me to leave?"

His eyes threaded wide at the question-and then a soft ease of regret as he turned his eyes downward.

"I don't think you know what you're asking for. I think you should leave, and I think you should leave tonight. I know you'll be fine."

Your eyes turned down to the ground, your other palm threading beside your arm as you caressed it, seeming more pitiable and with the odd combination of beauty that came from the purity of your humble helplessness while you turned your eyes down in thought. Bojack's expression winced as he walked forward, giving a slight hitch of his breath while he clumsily tried to find a word to say.

"Marry me."

It came out wavering and pathetic, wobbling and uneven while you spoke it. Your tone trembled as the words left your lips, and it was just as your existence was; flawed, unimpressive, impossibly small and gone before it had even come; and yet deserving of all of the freedom to be exactly what in your fully complexity as you spoke it, and Bojack could sense the void of complete tragedy for it to not be known and loved; just as he was, not because either of you were smoothed or perfect, but far from it; and that was all the more reason why it would be a tragedy to not give one another what was being asked.

Your eyes fluttered as you turned your expression back up to Bojack, bottom lip being bit down as the red edge of your eyes met onto his, body swaying. The question hung in the air as Bojack seemed physically taken at even so much of the statement of it, ears lowered and eyes wincing as his hand froze at the gesture he turned to you.

His voice came out awkward, clumsy in tone as he spoke a blunt but curious;"Why?"

"It doesn't have to be anything life changing." You stepped forward, and, clumsy as possible, did Bojack step back with an ease as he sidestepped the back of the table now, eyes threading up as he gazed at you with a soft resistance, hands raised up, more fear than rejection on his features. "It doesn't have to be anything at all."

"Erika, no-"

"We can keep doing what we've been doing, exactly as we are, and in any way that we want. No one has to know, and no one will ever use it against you. I'll protect you."

Bojack's expression tensed into a sharp rejection now.

"You cannot protect me, Erika. I can barely even protect you, and God knows that neither of us can deny that I have a much better chance of getting along than you do."

"I'll stay small. Nothing will be used against you. You'll still be you, as much as you ever could be, but I'll be here, giving you a sense of home and light. Belonging."

Bojack's eyes darted to the side as his teeth poked, and he kept his hands raised while he gaze you a slight exhaust of ease of rejection, though it was buried under his own features naturally etched in some purity that he wore on himself, whether he meant to or not.

"We've already been doing it together for long enough now. Nothing needs to change. But I do want to have some sort of declaration that we found something."

Your hips began to ease down as you kept your eyes on him with a glint of tired insistence, and Bojack's expression treamored as he followed your body while you eased yourself down onto the ground, slipping the ring off of your fingertip, gazing at him in earnest. You began to raise it to him, hands trembling while your kept your palms around it.

"Honey-I can't-" He turned his eyes to the side as fear etched across his expression, but a somber pout, and then a soft turn of his acceptance came over him as he turned his eyes back to where he met the gleam of your desperation. He gave a soft breath, eyes turning as he considered you. "Why are you doing this? Believing in it?"

"I love you."

"No." Bojack snapped his eyes away, eyes glaring in rejection as he snapped his head over his shoulder. "Don't say that."

Your breath shook as you turned your head down to your ring, trembling beside your palm as you did so. Bojack kept his hard, somber eyes over to the window beside him as he felt a rejection ease across his features, keeping his eyes wretched away pointedly as much as he was able; but he could hear how the ring fell to he ground while you gave a swear, could sense and imagine from your movement the endearing nature of your clumsiness, and he gave a soft breath as he closed his eyes, turning his hooded eyelids back to where your hands were trembling beside the ring.

"Don't mess with the damn thing." Bojack's hand fell from where he was keeping his fingers beside his palm as he walked over to you, eyes dim and lowered as he kneeled in front of your body. Your lip trembled as you turned your eyes up, blush increasing on your features, and your hands paused as you followed Bojack's movement while he kneeled himself in front of you with a soft grunt. He took the ring from the ground, frowning as he looked it over while turning it in the pad of his hands, then gave a soft breath as he lifted himself into a standing positon. He met your wandering, questioning desperate thread of an expression as he spoke; "This I will get rid of."

"Please don't." You snapped your body upward, reaching out for the ring placed between his fingertips. Bojack stepped back as he raised it higher, yourself giving a soft hitch of protest as you raised yourself on your heels and snapped for the ring.

"I did not think you had it in you to be this determined to take a damn metal ring. And all for a fake promise to put a label on something that dosen't even need to exist for things to continue as they are."

"Bojack, please." Your eyes snapped over to him, eyes drenched in emotion as you met his expression. Your voice cracked, and he hated the amount of profound grief that went through him at the sound of your desperation.

"Erika, I am telling you, this isn't something that you want to pursue."

"Why?" You stepped forward again, this time not reaching for the ring, but rather keeping your hands delicately pressed by your palms while you gazed at him with the worst thing you could have; a sense of respect and a narrative of emotion that came from the deepest core of being human. "Whatever you're feeling, we can turn it into something good. A blessing. Nothing is a weapon unless you don't take what it's teaching you and turn it into something you can use for your benefit. It dose-"

"No. Stop it." His ears flew down further, keeping the ring raised above his head. "You don't get to allow yourself to force yourself to believe that. It's not right."

"How do you think I managed to survive this long?" The breath hitched out of your lips as you stepped back from easing your arms up to Bojack, stepping backward while you have him a edge of challenge.

"Christ. Because you're smart. And you know how to make things your own. But you can't do that with an entire other life." He gestured between the both of you. "You can't take someone else's entire life and turn it into something other than what it is. We both need to know that and realize what that means."

"I do know. And you do, too." You stepped forward again, but Bojack took to stepping his way back, eyes darting, not bothering to keep himself away from you insistence, though he knew something within him that was considered especially tender was giving himself away. "Or do you want to keep turning over yourself over and over again and pretend like that's something considered a good life?"

"Everything you do in life, or become, or think will either succeed or fail based off of the idea of whether or not there's any love behind it. And if love dosen't come, then it will be how powerful your intention of love behind it is to see how bearable and worthwhile it is."

"Yeah. I know. I've been doing without it my entire life." His expression was defensive, puffy eyed, and flaring as he met your own insistence. "I've had more practice and more recognizability about that than you think. And let me tell you, it is not the required necessity you think it is."

"So what, then?" Your voice faltered as Bojack closed his eyes and turned his head away, eyes lowering down as he turned his heavily hooded eyes to the ring between his fingertips while he eased his body down from the tension a moment before. "You keep going on like that until something gives out."

"There's nothing to give out. I don't think there has been for a long time-and what do you know, when there's nothing to give out, there's nothing to grieve over, and that has been working out better for me than any other alternative." His eyes turned over the ring as he looked it over, then placed it between his two palms as he indicated his head to the door. "Now, I would like to throw this away, so please don't make this any more difficult than you've already made it and let me throw it out, please."

The life in your eyes dimmed as you stepped back, watching Bojack as he kept the ring in his palm while he walked his way to the door. Your feet stumbled behind as you watched him, and the only hint you could get from his inner melancholic narrative was the turn of his head as his somber eyes turned down to the ring in his fingertips. With a soft breath after a moment of turning it in his fingertips did he eased his hand on the door, opening it up as he began to walk his way outward, shouldering his way outside as he made his way past the living room, soft breaths and words of consideration easing out of his lip as he talked to himself while walking across the living room.

"You know, it's funny-the very girlfriend that gave me this damn ring with a sentiment that is completely outside of what I would usually expect from her would never last a day in your shoes. She has this narrative where she thinks it's so painful to be considered someone who is isn't constantly worthy of respect or who didn't earn to be alive that she would rather be working on her feet to the point where the bones cut out of her ankles and the wrinkles underneath her eyes are practically all that's left of her face before she would sit down for even a minute and allowed herself to simply exist for the sake of it. Some people feel that the nothingness that they are to the world more than others. Personally, I don't have the heart to tell her that nobody was ever really especially paying attention to her either way anyway; that she's just exhausting herself to death. You have an emotional wisdom and insight in that way, which I'm sure is another reason why you've been able to survive."

His voice was evening out more casually now as he had kept at the door casually opened while he had shouldered his way through it with a grunt, his voice trailing out from where he had exited. Your eyes snapped up in his direction as you begin to follow him, your pale hands gripping up against the side of your arms as you did so as you kept your head turned down while you began to make your way over through his slightly open door, eased open with with a small welcome of Bojack's clumsiness as you did so as you shouldered your slender arms beside it while you begin to follow Bojack, your eyes trailing behind his way as you began to follow him in his direction of deterred denial.

He was making his way out and over to the balcony. His casual words were clearly trying to change the subject, and even just from the casualty of how he was speaking he was giving away the idea and the suggestion that he thought he had won the conversation and he was now clumsily falling back into his own complacent humanity, no matter how much it would have and had punished him in the past, nothing would have been worth any kind of challenge of anything that you just presented to him; no how much it was clearly the right thing, or no matter how much insanity was on the other side of rejecting it.

He was chuckling to himself lately as he shouldered his way up against the doors to the pool and began to walk his way outward. Your hands trembled against the side of the door while you began to follow him, lips pressed together after you rushed across the living room and looked over towards where he was making his way out over to the balcony, outline drenched into the neon light of his pool and adding against the delicate lovable look of the way that it traced against his love handles and shoulders while he made his way out in his deterred contentment, turning his way around the pool and to the front of the balcony. He didn't keep his eyes off of the ring once, chuckling to himself underneath his breath in that bittersweet way that he did, and clearly rejecting anything that would have been able to speak of anything otherwise in terms of whether or not he was doing the right thing or even knew what he was doing it all, but you know that he had the emotional intelligence and insight to know that he must have; you know it for a fact.

"Bojack." You spoke his name delicately, and although you knew that he had heard he can do to walk his way over to the balcony, still chuckling to himself lately, as if he thought it all ag game. You stumbled your way forward rather than walking, not keeping your worried eyes off of his back once. He was a beauty and an entire narrative of a detailed life of beautiful humanity enough and seeming specifically for you enough that it felt as if it would have killed you just to take him in. "At the very least we can try to to go about this step-by-step to be able to see what comes up from the other end?" You felt a pain cut into your pale foot as you felt the cement cut into your foot, and you hissed lightly, not keeping your eyes off of the edge of Bojack as you continued to rush your way around the pool. "We won't go anywhere if you just do the same thing you've always done."

"It's not complicated." His voice was flat and sober, and although he was trying to deter from the conversation he was also giving you or to give the respect needed of even being able to acknowledge what was actually going on to begin with, you could sense how he revealed himself through his tone. He didn't even look over his shoulder to look over at you, the side of his round shoulders traced against the blue illuminated light and the way that it seemed to add a loveable ease of his conviction while he walked his way over to the side of the balcony, graceful, stoic, charismatic, and cowardly all at once."Nothing really is, once you begin to realize what life is about, which is pretty much nothing-unless you manage to carve out just enough to be able to distract yourself from the nothing. if you don't come it's not a big deal, but you also don't have to worry about trying to make a big deal out of something that isn't."

You stopped a few inches away from him.

"Is that something you've learned and kept with yourself as a 'better life', too?"

He turned over to you lightly now, waving the ring in his fingertips as he gazed at you with the emotion in his eyes that you knew held entire worlds and an emotional narrative full of depth that it broke you to even think of the love and detail within it. Your voice faltered, expression of word easing into a certain kind of emotional melancholy that you couldn't even bother to try to hide as you felt the next words of protest that you wanted to speak begin to fall on your lips as you saw just how set Bojack's heavily hooded eyes were, and with a soft dim of his features as he waved the ring in between his two fingertips did you falter your protest.

"This is trying to make something out of a life that doesn't have to be anymore stressful than it's already been. And believe me when I say that that statement is, for once, more about you than it is about me-which means that it's even more important that I speak it And even more important that you listen to it and understand why this needs to a thing."

"It doesn't." You tripped your way over with a hitch of your uneven breath. "I'm telling you, Bojack, it isn't."

"Mhmhm."

He turned as he began to make his way over to the edge of the balcony now fully, cradling the ring in his fingertip as he looked over the balcony with a pout of consideration; The ring that sat in his hands was still sat there with a certain kind of defined ease up into his fingertips as he made his way over to the edge of the balcony, pouting as he stood in front of the glass, and reaching out as he threaded his palm onto the balcony, threading his hands beside the ring as his thumb caressed it while he thought. He was clearly moving forward with the idea of throwing it over the edge of the balcony.

"A-and hu-"

He gave a soft grunt as he his stout body began to turned back while his arm waved up with the intention of throwing the ring-at least a little bit casual and playful; or at least as much as he could have made it within the heaviness of his intention. His stepped back a few paces while his arm raised upward fully, stumbling back with the dance of his feet as his plush body began to go into the position with the intention of throwing the ring off the side of the balcony.

You gave a soft protest as you began to restore rushing forward as your feet ran around the pool, giving a slight breath of protest while you rushed your way over to where Bojack was in position to throw the ring off of the balcony. Your hand snapped up as you gripped your hand against the side of his arm, your fingertips traveling up as you did so as you did so while you gave a snap of a troubled protest, your swears coming out from your mouth in protest as fingertips trembled up against his arm.

"What-"

His head snapped over the side of his shoulder as he snapped his eyes over to you, stumbling to the left or right while he froze in keeping raised up over the side of his head. He reached out of hand and tried to find you to offered you the bewildered glare of his emotion as you started jumping up on your feet to catch the ring raised above your reach. Bojack's eyes flared, but his stout body stumbled back in response to your movement while he barely managed to keep himself from stumbling over the side of the balcony, eyes widening as he snapped out a hand to grip beside the balcony while eyes widened as he gave an abrupt breath from being forced over by your sudden attack.

He swatted you away successfully, your body stepping back as he snapped his hand beside your face. His eyes were drenched in complicated protest as he snapped;"What are you doing?"

"Please give me the ring."

Your voice was coming out shaky and uneven as you snapped yourself upward to the ring as you recovered, reaching out your hands to it; Bojack gave a slight protest as he stumbled his body to the balcony as he felt the breath hitch out of his mouth while the breath was knocked out of him while he gave you a flair of protest in his expression.

"Hey." His ears flew down as he snapped his eyes to you in protest, but you continued to bounce on your feet as you tried to grapple for the ring. His body twisted awkwardly, surprisingly agile and at the very least physically creative for somebody that was a stout and as plush as much as he was as he continuously kept the ring up and just out of your ability to reach towards it. His ears lowered in a maddening fashion as he actively snapped his figure towards your direction while the glare of his eyes met your desperate expression, arms and his chubby palms coming to rest beside the large plush of his body as he bent in your direction in defiance, loveable and endearingly molded in lost human complacency and intimidatingly emotionally intelligent and angry at the same time.

"Stop." His hand snapped at your flailing arms, expression tense in annoyance as he kept throwing his hands beside your action. "Hey. I said stop."

His words were edged with annoyance and his tone more defiant that it caused you to step back, just enough that the that you got the idea of his lack of temper and the true abrasiveness of it this time.

You stopped in the middle of thrashing as you came just out of reach of Bojack's hands, turning your hand beside your chest as your eyes dimmed as you stepped away backward, fully turning into yourself as Bojack turned to you fully with defiance, a sharp emotional intelligence to the way that he fired his eyes at you, ears snapped lowered downward as he did so that that glared at you with a deeper abrupt insistence while he snapped a finger up the sky in your direction with the same sharp emotional intelligence and defense.

"Hey if you want to stay here, then fine. Of course I'm not going to kick you out after everything that I know about you. But you don't get to make calls like this, and you don't get to bring this up again, you understand?" He straightened his round disposition upward as he gave you a light flair of his eyes. "If you want to stay here, you're going to have to go with the rules that I put down, and not bring shit like this up and especially telling not telling me what I can or can't throw off of my balcony or whatever shit that I decide is too far is definitely a part of that."

Your eyes were threading over his offering delicately, trembling with an edge of emotion while eyes darted down to where he had the ring barely placed between his thumbs. Bojack's eyes lowered into an exhaustion of understanding as he eased his body back upright, threading the ring back over to both of his palms as he glared and looked it over.

"Unless you want me to do the right thing and throw it over." He turned his stout body over to the balcony as he gave you a somber look. "Something that I know I've made very clear I am perfectly ok with and would extensively recommend, which I know I've made very clear, but-here I am, doing it again, because, as I've stated, this is the best way of going about a transaction like this."

Though he kept his head over his shoulder while he gave you a slight edge of a flair of his eyes that spoke of both emotional disclosure and a challenge, his hand was still aiming over the balcony, fingertips threading beside the ring. You stopped for a moment as the emotion in your eyes was wet with emotion and conflict, pale hands gripped beside your arms; and then you rushed forward just as Bojack was about to toss the ring over the edge of the balcony as he gave a slight hitch of recognition of the best thing to do.

"Last chance." He turned his somber and reflective eyes over to you, but his other hand kept his palm on the balcony. "Whenever you're ready. Either way, the choice is being made in a few minutes, so."

"Give me the ring, please." Your voice cracked as you stepped your way forward with resolve. The somber resolve in Bojack's eyes widened as he watched you step forward.

"Wait, really?"

"At least let me hold it. It won't matter or make a difference long term. Just let me hold it, at least. Something to hold onto. It dosen't have to be a big deal."

Bojack gave a hitch of a breath while he tried to catch the rhythm of his panic while he stepped his way back, giving a slight abrupt breath as his back was knocked beside the balcony.

"If you're sure-but, just to be clear, this does not resolve anyone from making any commitments, ok?"

"I don't need to have a confirmation as to what means what. I just need something. The understanding that you've given me emotionally these past few weeks has given me a sense of what relief feels like, release from the sickness." Your eyes turned down to the ring, expression gleaming with ambition. "I don't know or care what I should want. This is enough."

His eyes flicked down to the ring, giving a hitch of uneven breath as he did so while his eyes winced as he looked it over. Though it took visible effort, he gave a slight cough as he snapped his eyes up to you, ears lowered while the conflict stayed painted across his features. He gave a slight hitch of a breath, a resolve easing against his eyes, and then stepped forward as he handed the ring to your direction, giving a rhythm of shaken breath as he did so while he threaded his thumb beside the silver ring. He stepped forward, eyes wincing as he gazed down at the ring with a shaken emotional breath, then handed it over in your direction, ears lowered , face resolved and defiant. Your eyes flashed down as your face tensed, eyes turning up to Bojack in question: he flicked his eyes to the ring as he indicated his palm to yourself."

"Take it. If it means that much to you. It's just a ring, it doesn't change anything."

Something lit in your eyes; and the focus within your expression sparkled-but only for a dim moment as you watched the ring while kept and passed in his chubby palm.

"It is beautiful."

"Yeah. Side of the road beautiful." His eyelids were lowered as he watched your eyes turn to the ring. Whatever pain you harbored inside of yourself that seemed to be beyond the majority, to the point of some spiritual suffocation that was pure enough to be unable to adjust to the sickness of the world around them without corruption, it seemed to ease for a moment as your eyes trailed across the cheap silver ring, Bojack's thumb threading beside it.

"Thank you." You spoke it earnestly as your stepped forward, and Bojack only managed a small nod, teeth poking as he watched you make your way to the ring, reaching forward as you threaded the cheap silver metal in your hand while turning over the small metal piece in your palm. Bojack took to lowering his eyes in his aged and heavy exhaustion as he stepped his way back over towards the balcony, and as he did so he continuously tried to keep the quickening pace of his heart and worry to a minimum as much as he was able; he wanted to trust that the ring was just a ring.

"In terms of you-staying here." Bojack seemed as if he were climbing over his words in the muddle of his uncertainty, and you turned your eyes up from the silver ring, glistening with emotion as you turned your eyes up from the observation of it; both intimate and comfortable for Bojack to take in at once. His fingers came to thread beside his palm as he watched you with hollowed and uncertain eyes. " I want to trust that you can actually try to follow the right decision, and not make me have to do something that is going to hurt the both of us that I will probably regret later." A small shrug as the muscles on his face and trapped in thought, conflicted and graceful in thought. "But it's up to you. It's really not a complicated thing, like I just said. Unless you want to make it, which most people do, in which case, I don't think I have any choice but to throw you out, because God knows that I don't have the energy or the patience for any of that, especially not when it comes to bullshit like this. And I think that you know that. I just wish that you would listen to the reasons as to why asking for more isn't what you think it is."

"I know what I'm asking for." Your words were spoken softly as you kept your eyes easing across the ring, tilting your head to the side as you looked the cheap silver over, contentment easing in your expression, though Bojack could sense the want of adventure in it, and that intimidated him. Your eyes flicked up to Bojack in their confident emotion of beauty that was eased in its wretchedness while you turned and met his eyes, and he stepped back lightly as eyes widened. "I just wish you could understand what I'm asking. What it means if we don't. For the both of us."

Bojack's eyes flicked to the side as he kept his fingertips sweating up against this palms, stepping his way back with an ease of focus until he felt his foot hitting beside the balcony, and with a soft somber consideration he allowed himself to lean against the balcony, other hand coming to rest beside the gray bar. His eyes turned down in thought as a conflicted expression eased across his expression while he turned his eyes down in thought, yourself turning to the ring again as you turned the material in your palms while looking it over. His expression became somber, resolve tensing across his features as he turned his eyes up to you while you were focusing on the trailing of the ring in your palm.

"I think you should leave in the morning."

Your eyes snapped up to Bojack's again, and that tension came across your features, but Bojack felt a resolve to hold his own as his face tensed while meeting your eyes.

"Of course I'll pay for someone to take you somewhere and house you for a little while. I have plenty of friends-or, at least, plenty of decent ones. I know you think you trust yourself and your head-"

"I never said that."

Bojack's ears lowered as his expression tensed. "-In regards to what you keep bringing up about the marriage thing, I'd say you've proven yourself to be pretty confident. But there's a sickness that can get so bad that you won't even realize its happening until it's too lae-and believe me, it affects everything more than you could ever think." His hand gestured by his chest as he gazed at you in earnest. "I know more than anyone. This warning is just as much for me as it is for you."

You said nothing, and you only gazed at Bojack with what seemed like an extensive shock snapped into your eyes that came from your defensive emotional narrative. Bojack felt a black and sickly defense at your clear defense of his resolve, and his eyes winced in insult as he walked his way over to where you kept the ring balance in your fingertip.

"Ok. Here. We'll make it calm and simple, ok? If you can't make a decision, I'll take this, and you can-"

You snapped your body to the side as you sidestepped Bojack's attempt and gripping his hands onto the ring; his eyes widened as teeth poked as he watched you sidestep with the ring pressed firmly between fingertips as you tumbled your way to the side.

'Erika-" Bojack winced nervously, giving a slightly breath and nervous chuckle, attempting to be at least vaguely tender, as he snapped and reached for your hands again. "Erika, this is for the best. Maybe you can't see that right now-" He snapped his body forward to try and grip out of your fingertips again with another nervous breath leaving his lips as he stepped his way forward, expression softening into desperation as he watched you step to the side, fingertips threading beside the ring while you snapped your eyes down to it.

"Ok. My mind is made up. Give me the thing. Please. I'll take you somewhere, you can freshen up, take care of yourself, forget about this. But not if you keep obsessing over this." He stepped forward, hands stretched out, and another awkward chuckle left his lips as he managed; "Erika-"

Bojack's fingertips did manage to grasp beside your palm as you had slowed down in stepping back, and for a moment did it seem as if you were open to being welcoming to Bojack taking control. But as the tip of his fingertip threaded beside the ring as he tried to pull it back; you abruptly claimed your hand bride Bojack's wrist, his eyes widened as he felt your hand grip beside his wrist as he felt his body paralyzed by yours as he gave an awkward tension of a hitch of his cut off whimper; as you grabbed his hand entirely as you yourself gave an awkward hitch of your breath as his eyes widened while he was forced forward from the grasp of your hand on his arm as he tumbled his ay forward, your hand reaching up and snapping up against his so much to the point that Bojack's body tripped forward; he lost his balance badly enough that he stepped back as his eyes kept widened while he threw his body back, his other hand coming to grip beside your arm as his feet tripped backward, giving a soft hitch of his breath while his back slammed beside the balcony. Your head snapped over to where Bojack's body was stumbling back from his lack of balance, his eyes widened as he gave an abrupt hitch of a breath while his body snapped back beside the rail in a blur of the conflict between you.

"Bojack-"

Your hand snapped out to catch him; the force of which he had been thrown back from your hand had been enough that his body had abruptly been thrown and casted beside the balcony just enough that his weight went flying over the side of the rail, causing his body to throw itself over the rail as another awkward breath left his breath abruptly; though he tried to find some grounding with his hands flying out, he stumbled back-so much to the point that his body tumbled up over against the edge of the balcony, stout legs turned up and body curled within himself as his weight was thrown back, throwing his head back with a hitch of his breath while he did so while his weight threw itself over the balcony. For a moment he disappeared as his body was thrown over the ledge, and you felt a black panic as you rushed your way over to the rail, heart lurching in your throat as you rushed your way to the edge of the balcony.

Your hand was sweating as you turned your hand beside the rail, balancing the ring between the spaces of your hand as you snapped your body forward and over the rail, eyes frantically looking over the edge of the balcony as your fingertips gripped against the rail, palms barely able to keep a grip from your trembling.

"Bojack-"

Your voice was cut out and over to the black of the sky through the night, and disappeared only through how your words were swallowed by Bojack's abrupt and frantic calls as he kept his head turned forward, eyes widening into an expanse of desperation as he swung from the balcony, palms barely managing to keep gripped up on the edge as his body swung. His mouth was hung open as his eyes kept widened on the balcony while he met yours as much as he could in his sickly panic, palms slipping beside the balcony against the side of the silver balcony as he did so, kicking his stout legs as he did so while his attempted to scramble his way back up, expression encased in fear.

Your eyes snapped up as your fingertips gripped beside the ring while you heard the panicked hitch of his breath as his body was scrambling beside the wall of the house, yourself gripping the ring while you kept your body snapped over the balcony, breath hitching out of your lip while you kept your body snapped over the metal edge. Your head snapped over the edge of the balcony as your heart lurched in your throat while you looked for anything to help Bojack up; you knew that you wouldn't be able to hoist him up on your own, and there was only so much time until he released himself from the balcony. Bojack's hands were sweating and barely gripped beside the balcony as his eyes were wide and dilated while he swayed under the balcony, pupils small and eyes encased in his panic while he snapped up to where you had rushed your way to the edge of the balcony.

"Oh-oh-uhm-oh-" His breath came out frantic as his head snapped over his shoulder, stout body swaying lightly as he did so, expression encased in panic.

"Bojack, take my hand."

Though your heart lurched in your throat, you snapped your body over the balcony while your arm threaded across the ledge; your eyes were dim and red edged as your hand reached out for his, even as you felt your heart quicking and your panic blurring around you that came with lack of acceptance of reality. His pupils were dilated as he snapped his eyes up to where your hand was reaching out, body curled forward. Bojack's teeth poked out as his breath hitched while he continued to kick beside the wall as he began to leverage his body forward as much as he was able to, his head tilted forward as he gave a treamored ease of his desperation while he jutted his body forward even as his body trembled under the attempt.

He jutted his body upward with a hitch and a quick stumble of his body as he forced himself upright, one hand snapping up as he threaded his hand and tried to reach for your palm, and though you gave a soft breath of encouragement, his body abruptly was forced bak, eyes dilating as his body was forced down as he gave a sudden abrupt hitch of his tone as the breath was knocked out of him; his eyes kept widened and turned up as he tried to scramble his way up the balcony edge, scrambling to the front; but his body abruptly stumbled back to the point where both of his hands slipped from the balcony entirely, his body thrown back as his body tumbled forward with such a sudden and abrupt force that his body stumbled back with the breath knocked out of him, body tossed forward as his body slammed beside the all, and you gave out your own scream while your body threw itself over the edge of the balcony in your panic, Bojack's body stumble further over as the breath abruptly snapped out of his lips while both of your screams echoed though the air. Bojack, though for a moment lost on freefall, managed to grip his hand beside the wall as he slammed his fingertips beside it, his body swaying as he kept his head turned forward while he snapped his body with a sudden pause as his fingers kept gripped beside the brick that happened to be jutted out a few paces from the gray wall as his body swung, expression twisted in panic as his eyes kept even more dilated while his body swung abruptly as he managed to keep one hand gripped beside the brick while he swung abruptly.

"What was that?"

There was a trail of two voices that came from the road that settled itself under the swinging of Bojack's body, and though there was a sickness of fear that was thrashed beside his features, he snapped his head over his shoulders while he turned and watched where there were two well off neighbors walking down from the street; a man and his wife, his arm reached out beside where his partner was beside him, a delicate pigeon woman, her white arm wrapped up by the man beside her that made up a rich endowed pale man, cleanly shaven as his voice turned up over through the air that was surrounding him just enough that it caused Bojack to turn his head over his shoulder, fear still clearly present in his eyes as he snapped his head over to them while the wincing of his expression turned over into an increased exalt of desperation. his body swaying as he gave an abrupt breath of his own fear as he turned his head over his shoulder while he kicked his feet and attempted to collect his panic as his body continued to sway.

Your own body was halfway across the balcony, but abruptly did you begin to gradually ease yourself backward; if only for the sake of making sure that you yourself didn't fall over, your hands coming to rest by the side of the balcony as you did so as you turned your eyes over Bojack's while you looked over to where the couple was turning their eyes and looking in between the both of you. Bojack was still letting out frantic and panicked breaths as he continued to swing on the front of the balcony as he turned his head over his shoulder while he looked over at them desperately, one hand swinging downward, the other hand barely gripping the side of the jutting brick.

"Bojack?"

The man turned his head upward as he saw the way that Bojack was swinging from the side of the wall while Bojack turned his head over his shoulder and faced them as best as he was able, the fear still clearly etched on his features the and front of his eyes, his ears threaded downward as he did so. The man's wife beside him began to laugh slightly , calmed as her voice thrilled up over through the air.

"It's funny. I remember him telling me one time when he was a little bit too drunk at a bar that he always daydreamed about doing this one day just for the sake of trying to stick it to anybody who would ever give him a hard time."

Her eyes turned up with amusement as Bojack continued to keep himself hanging with frantic breaths and small whimpers as he did so, body swinging behind the wall. The wife's eyes flicked up as she looked him over, amusement in her eyes as her expression turned from Bojack and over to yours. "At least he managed to figure out how to do that much at this point. I didn't think it would take the woman that he decided to take in to get to this point."

Your breath was coming out frantically, your thoughts racing just as much as you tried your best to find a solution. you turned your head back over the balcony as you tried your best to me Bojack's panicked eyes, his body swaying as he turned his head and looked up at you, eyes winced and ears lowered

"Bojack, they can be there to take care of you if you fall."

His voice hitched as he called out, "Are you serious?"

"Or you can at the very least make sure that you're not unwatched."

"Your little girlfriend thing there is right. You're clearly going to fall either way, you may as well make sure that you have some safety when it happens." The pigeon woman chuckled as she looked Bojack over. "How did you manage to get in this position, anyway?"

"I don't know, it must have happened when I was trying to get myself out of the corner of a conversation I didn't want to be in the first place-ow!" Bojack's voice abruptly scraped up against the side of the brick as he gave another about to yell in a way that echoed out over into the area the same way that both yours and his had when he had first fallen over. "Son of a-"

Your head turned over to the side as you kept the silver ring threaded up into your fingertips, if only for the sake of at least a little bit of comfort, and Bojack's eyes snapped upward s he looked over at you, too drenched into threat of infuriated fear so as he turned his head up, ears lowered as he looked over you with a fearful eyes and a slight hitch of a breath while his hand kept confided up against at the side of the brick, though it was clear from the sweat that was against his palms that he was already beginning to slip back as he gave up the slight hitch and an uneven rhythm of the breath as he did so. He began to throw his body back as he felt another lip, eyes jolting in emptiness and fear as his eyes dilated in panic. Your hand gripped up against the side of the balcony as you turned your head over to the couple as you called to them; "Does it look like he would get hurt, if he fell over right now?"

"I can't do that!" Bojack called out as his voice hitched while his body continued to sway as he snapped his eyes up andover towards the side of you of where you leaned to the side of the balcony-he gave another and more intense panic of his clear cowardly fearful richness in his eyes while his ears were running back as he tried to hang on. He gave another abrupt and unforgiving slight edge of a hitch of his breath as he did so as he tried his best to feel at ease himself while he swayed, gripping his stout body further upward as his stomach curled; only to give an abrupt swear as he body threw itself back. His eyes snapped as he looked over at you as he did so with the same desperation as his eyes snapped up and looked you over. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Let yourself down." The husband began to walk forward with this other arm against his wife as she gave a nod and contentment while she began to follow him, her eyes turning up gently as her gentle eyes observed how Bojack was swinging against the brick. Bojack gave a hitch of a protest while his body continued to swing from the side of the brick, though he snapped his head back over his shoulder to focus frantically on the neighbors. "It's not as far as it looks like, Bojack. It looks like you won't do more than just have a little bit of sore muscles for the next couple of nights."

"Sore muscles-or an entire broken body where I won't be able to move to myself around if I'm getting caught up in another conversation that cost me to get to this point to begin with?"

He gave up a slight hitch in his entire expression began to gave away to something that would have suggested strain as he closed his eyes and gave another desperate tripped breath as his small pupils turned upward in panic; and it was clear from just the strain he was having from his plump and out of shape body how much he was struggling to continue to keep himself upright as his body continued to sway. "if I knew that I was going to go like this , I wouldn't have let myself get coordinated with the goddamn conversation to begin with!"

"Let him down," the pigeon woman said, turning her eyes up as she looked over at you with permission. "He's going to fall anyway, and I can reassure you that it's not as long as it looks from where you're standing,"

"It's exactly as long as it looks!" Bojack's voice etched out in protest. "I specifically made sure that I had a building that was far enough away that it would be dangerous to be able to jump off of it in case I ever had a night to like the ones that I've been having lately!

The husband followed his wife over to where Bojack was swaying, Bojack's head snapped over his shoulder, eyes lowering as the man gave a slight, somber and gentle as he walked his way forward and with his hand signed up against his wife, their energy somber, silver and focused as they walked their way from the road and over to the bottom of the rocks Bojack's house was built on.

"There's multiple hills until it gets down to the actual bottom.

"I know that!" Bojack's voice hitched in protest, the thread of his voice as he screamed out easing into the air in a humble and defiant sort temperament. "I"m the one who lives here!"

"Then you should know you're on a multiple rocks and a massive boulder, not just one that just goes straight down." The man's voice was sober in contrast to the annoyance of Bojack's, although you could see the way that a genuine desperate black panic had begun to ease into a soft release as he did so is he gave a slight breath of his eyes he looked over towards the edge of the balcony with his hands beginning to thread up against the side of the edge of the brick as he gradually begin to release himself-and you only kept your hands gripped up against the balcony as you felt yourself easing up against the rail you as he saw the way that his body was stumbling back. A slight dark blue fog was easing up against the night sky you snapped right up to where there was a dark blue reflecting against the hue of the clouds that surrounded against the black, your eyes staring in a curious desperation as you heard the way that Bojack was giving a slight swear in his breath as he swayed his own plush body while he continued to thrash and cradled his body as much as he was able even as he began to slip, gradually beginning to allow his body to turn back with the desperate trust that there would be a boulder that would catch him. You weren't able to see, and couldn't offer any reassurance; but you could see the reassurance of the couple as the husband seemed to be sober and confident along with his wife, whole within one another as it was with two healthy people who were seen and loved, and even just to take that in sent a bittersweetness to you that overcame you for a moment as you watched them as your body turned back; something about them that reminded you of what Bojack had given you the past couple of nights, and something that overcame your disposition that choked you with an almost too beautiful depthful peace for a moment; a reassurance despite the situation.

"Just fall!" the wife called out, and Bojack gave another moan and then whimper of exhaust as his breath slipped out into a defensive exhaust, taking to turing his head over his shoulder while he continued to attempt to do the impossible of keeping himself on the brick. A small chuckle came from the husband as Bojack did so. and as you watched the both of them within their casualty, you felt something begin to overcome you that seemed as if it was it that seemed as if it was an extension of a certified acceptance and of the vague sense of trust when you heard the way that Bojack was still letting out his own breath breaths of releaisng, and time begin to slow with the meaning of it.

Bojack continued to give frantic breaths from his lips while you watched in your own concern, eyes dilating and eyes widened as he continued swinging by the small ledge of the brick. He continued to give a laborious breath of his of his own panic as he his body swayed, and though there was resistance in his eyes, it was clear he was already slipping from the edge of the brick. You gave a slight hitch of a breath as you tried to speak his name in encouragement, but his name died on your lips; you didn't want to break his concentration. Bojack gave a few more abrupt and frantic panicked breaths as you heard his minute desperate whimpers until his palms slipped from the jutting out brick, and he gave an abrupt hitch of his breath of an awkward panicked breath that snapped into the air with its awkward panic, and with an ease of his panic that was both humble and endearing in its helplessness did he give a whimper of exhaust-and then released his hands from the side of the brick, his body curling back as he did so is his body slammed down the rock. You called out his name on instinct of your sudden black panic as you snapped your body over the verge of the balcony when you could no longer catch his body swaying beside the edge of the balcony-he had disappeared for a moment, but his body was slammed onto the rock as you slipped your body over the ledge and snapped your eyes over to where he was lying now; his stout body, to your relief, was curled inside of itself, the force of his fall abruptly slammed onto the rock that had been a few inches away from his fall, a small leverage of the rocks where the breath had been knocked out of him that was only an inch or two as the leverage abruptly caught his fall, thought his plump body was knocked out if I miss his ears lowered, pain itching across his wrinkled features as he did so is he still a backup against the edge of the rock. His eyes widened as his plush body curled into itself, eyes widened and neck snapping forward as his ears flew down while he gave an abrupt call of pain, voice low and tramored, clumsy and human as his wobbling voice eased in the air.

"God! Ow!"

"Can you breathe?"

The question eased out of your lips as your voice wavered, hands gripping beside the balcony as you watched Bojack's plush body curl into itself. The married couple were rushing their way over the hill and to where Bojack's voice was wobbling with his plush body curled into itself, his hands cramped beside his palms as he only contained to let out the hitch of his treamoring moans.

You managed to turn your head over the side of the balcony enough that you could catch Bojack's eyes wincing as his body turned upright, stout legs kicking as his head turned back while his voice countiend to tremble with moans into the air. The breath was knocked out of him while he continued to moan painfully while he hitched out his moans in between labored breaths-but your panic began to subside as the black panic settled and you realized that the fall had only knocked he breath of him, but hadn't come close to genuinely harming him.

"Did you make it?" The wife's voice seemed vaguely amused as Bojack began to sit himself up; his eyes winced as his ears few back while he rubbed the middle part of his back. You felt your panic subside as your body began to release your tension, giving a breath of relief as you saw Bojack sit his plush body upright, though the age of his face was cramped in pain as he gave labored hitches of his breath.

"I'm..okay." Bojack barely managed the edge of his clear annoyance through uneven breaths between his words as he rubbed the middle part of his back, ears lowered as he opened his eyes into a timid wince while he breathed through the poking of his teeth. His body was collecting itself from the tension as he gave an abrupt and tender labor of his breath to release the uneven hit on his body, and you gave up a slight sigh of your own relief while you felt the last of your black tension begin to be released. Your eyes turned up to the couple that were now on the edge of the road, the husband setting with raising his arm beside his wife while they watched Bojack with a vague ease of smoothing amusement. The neon fog that was etching up over through the edge of the front of the sky and seemingly easing through the road and increasing through the large expanse of the space of the air that the height of Bojack's house allowed him, and the neon light seemed as if it was increasing, along with the blue dark tint of the blue fog that seemed to be inherent within their presence as the wife kept her body eased beside her husband.

"Might not have been a decent fall, but you got yourself of off the porch." The husband called out with a small chuckle through the fog. Your body was still firmly pressed beside the balcony, but you kept yourself just tense enough so you could keep an eye on Bojack's curling body on top of the cliff.

"Thank you." You called out, as much as you could have hoped to have been heard of through the fog, and Bojack gave another uneven hitch while he tried to collect himself through his uneven breath, breathing laboriously as he did so while he kept his eyes winced in pathetic discomfort.

"What's to thank?" Bojack's hard eyes snapped up to where you were standing by the balcony. "All they did was acknowledge the obvious of what would very clearly happen because of physical means anyway!"

"How much does it hurt?"

"Falling off of a balcony and onto one of my rocks? Indefinitely." Bojack's eyes were lowered and empty as his ears flew down, but the main emotion in his eyes was one of a husk of empty jaded exhaustion.

"I'll come right down."

Before Bojack could respond you rushed your way away from the balcony, hands rushing away from the balcony as you rushed yourself across the porch and the pool while you shoved your hand against the sliding door, shoving yor way into the living room as you began to rush away across the living room, shoving your trembling hand onto the outside of the gray door while you rushed your way down he steps of the front door, wrapping your arms beside your cheat as you began to rush away against the driveway, the vague sound of night crickets and whimpering through the air as you did so while you began to rush your way down and over the abrupt downslope of the hill that made up the back of Bojack's house as you rushed your way down the hill slope, keeping your hands gripped beside your arms while you rushed your feet down through the green grass and down through the tall and awkward wooden steaks that jutted up Bojack's house.

Your eyes snapped up and over to the layers of rock that made up the structure of Bojack's house, and you could still hear the vague whimpers and moans that came from Bojack's mouth as he rolled on the rock. The couple was standing on the verge of the backyard, warm conversation easing into the air along with Bojack that was the only noise that came along with the quiet that came along with the elite quiet of Los Angeles for Bojack's atmosphere. For the time being, as you were sure it felt for Bojack, it only seemed haunting and trapped in.

With your arms gripped beside your arms you rushed your way over to where the bottom rubble of the rocks was while you snapped your head up to seeing the height of the layered rocks where Bojack's voice was trailing out, threading your body through the fog as you stopped where there was only a few rubbles of pebbles and rocks.

"Would the both of you feel alright if we stopped across the grass to communicate for a bit?"

The muscles on your face furrowed in bewilderment as you turned your head over your shoulder to where the couple stood, keeping their bodies on the verge as they watched you with notable serene faces. Your eyes flicked down in momentary bewildered thought, then turned back up to them as you gave a quick frantic nod.

"Sure." You stepped back, giving a vague breath of tension as you turned your head up to where you could still hear Bojack's moaning and panting. "Someone has to help get him down from there."

"Whatever reason that made Bojack do what he did, I'm sure that it was for a reason of resisting whatever pain he was trying to escape. Even when it comes to stumbling over a balcony, everyone does something for a bigger sense of relief from whatever he was trying to avoid.

The husband's voice was soothing with what seemed like an innate spiritual reassurance, and the muscles on your face furrowed as you turned your head over your shoulder and stepped back while you watched the couple step through the blue fog.

"Poor thing." The wife turned her eyes to you, sharp and large eyes sharpening against you as she gave you a small raise of her lip that seemed to come from observance of something she saw inside of you. "At least you're teaching him how to follow his own instincts instead of suffering putting it aside. He's been doing that for too long."

"Do you know him"?"

"What?" The husband chuckled. "Bojack Horseman?"

You nodded, keeping your arms fully closed in against your chest as your body closed in with anticipation.

"We've been his neighbor for years." The wife stopped forward as her white feathered fingertips began to thread into her pocket, easing into the front of her dress as she pulled out a white card. It was tinted in gold on the edge, and your eyes turned in curiosity as you watched her thread the card out from between her fingertips. "We came over here tonight because we got some faulty mail and decided we had the time on our hands tonight to return it to him." The wife's eyes eased over you as she took you in, small contentment in her eyes at her observance of you. "Are you the wife, then?"

A slight jolt went through your heard at the question. You gave a quick laugh, shaking your head as you gave her a small amused relief while your hands swept beside your face in your nervousness.

"No."

"The wife's mother, then? Someone who introduced him?"

"I'm not anyone at all to him." You gave a light shrug, turning your eyes over to where Bojack was still giving his pained breaths, though it seemed as if the pain in his body had gradually begun to release, his ears perked up now, his body curled into itself as his breaths became more somber and at ease. You walked your way to the bottom of the rubble of the cliff, your fingertips threading beside the silver ring as you walked fully to the bottom of the hill, feeling a big sense of relief as you did so now that it was clear Bojack had collected himself again. "I'm just someone he decided to take in for a little while. I was planning on leaving soon."

"Strange." The wife's white face and her pouted beak semed barely visible through the dark blue fog, but her voice was an outwardly intentional as ever in her insight. "You look like you would be the kind of woman he would be settling down to marry."

Your eyes flashed in curiosity as you looked between them. "Did Bojack say something about getting married?"

"You tell me." The wife stepped forward as she handed you the card. Your eyes turned down and looked at the golden glint of the card as your head turned to the side as you watched the cursive writing beside the front of the bleak white card. Your eyes snapped up to the wife, and she gave you a small raise of her mouth as it met her eyes while she stepped back as you placed both fingertips between the card.

"Was from his friend, Eddie. Said he was excited for him and wanted him to rent the area. Seemed like a nice man when we called him over the phone and asked him if he meant to invite us. He was in great, jolly spirits, the small little thing, and the rough cackle of his voice was like nothing else. Had a lot of joy in his heart, the little thing. He said in a good humor that we could show up and come alone any way we wanted. Was open to anyone. Said some funny things about how 'we would all be celebrating soon', or something similar. He seemed to be in good spirits. Made me feel better."

"It just goes to show that it's not about the money or the status, it's about the energy. The personality. Something anyone can obtain. He didn't seem like he had much, just came from a nothing little nowhere cabin area, but I had never been around someone that made me feel so good so quickly." The wife turned her head to her husband, and he nodded in agreement lightly. "Certainly was full of more life than most of the people I know around here."

"He was nice and full of life, that was for sure. Enough that we felt it was worth it to come over here and see what we could do to help him out with the miscommunication."

The husband turned his head over to where Bojack was sitting upright, as much as his stout and now vaguely bruised and crippled body could manage, his ears perked up again as his body turned upright while he kept to pressing his fingertips beside his wrists. He turned his plush body over to the side of the ledge while his eyes were turned down in hooded exhaust while he kept his fingertips rubbing beside his wrist as he began to collect himself, grunting as he turned his thighs over to the ledge while his expression tensed in his exasperation while he turned his frustration over the verge of the cliff. "And, even more interesting, he said that your host here was getting married."

"I'm sorry, how am I supposed to get off of this thing?" Bojack turned his attention over the verge of the cliff while his eyes eased it in question, eyes flickering over the verge of it.

"We can call someone." The wife called out in a guise of an attempt to be helpful. You were kept occupied by turning your eyes over the card as you read the cursive letters on it;

Eddie, camper and husband to Lorraine, joining in members and communion of the celebration of the marriage and bonding of Bojack Horseman and his newly wed wife. Event spanning for several days at a time. Come and go as you wish; we'll provide a campfire and all the food and comfort you could imagine.

Yours and kindly,

Eddie

"What?" Bojack's eyes were bulging as he snapped his head over the edge of the cliff, hands gripped beside the cliff as he looked it over frantically, ears thrown down as a tension overcame his features of his endearing cowardly fear. "No! Then a lot of authorities and people will be crowding and surrounding the area and clustering the place, and I'll have to deal with the amount of noise and chaos and entitled who knows else coming over once there starts being a weird invitation that people can start coming over here. No thank you!"

"How else would you want to be helped?" "I don't know!" Bojack's expression was tense in annoyed exhaust as he snapped his eyes over the ledge of the cliff, pupils dilated while he kept curled within himself as he made his way to the verge of the cliff. "Can you get a ladder or something?"

Bojack's voice was hitching into a thread of unwavering emotion as his voice hitched into the air on the verge of how overwhelmed he was, eyes scanning the verge of the cliff.

"I'll climb up to him." You pressed the card beside your body as you walked your way to where there was a small trail up to where Bojack was curled in himself with his intimate fear, your head turned up while you watched his body curled in himself as he kept his hands beside his expression in timid caution, breathing heavily in his own intimated pants. The blue fog was increasing, the sense of being able to get through reality without a thickened and increase sens of physical tension beginning to lesson. Your hand eased on the rock in front of you, turning your head upward as you watched Bojack snap his head over the verge of the cliff. "I think I see a small path. Do you mind if I walk up and help you down?"

"Do I mind? I'll take anything."

Your head turned as you looked over to the couple beside you, at least as much as he dark blue fog would allow you. Your eyes turned down as you gripped your hand beside the rock, then turned your attention to the small and rubble but still clear trail of dirt that would eventually, through sharp rocks and ledges, lead over to where Bojack was crippled inside of his plush form while he sat on top of the rock.

"You can both go, if you'd like." You turned as you nodded to the couple in front of you, threading your fingertips beside the card as you placed it into one of the pockets that came from the threaded and ripped white clothes around your body. "We'll be fine from here. Thank you for the card."

"Card?" Bojack was now sitting with his stout legs swinging over the ledge of the cliff, expression furrowing as his plush body bent over the edge of it, "Are you taking thing from strangers when I'm in the middle of trying to get myself down from an incredibly intimating and unpleasant circumstance?"

"They came to return something that belongs to you. I think if you read it, you would agree that it we're lucky to have people consider coming over here. It'll leave us a lot to talk about."

"Will it?" Bojack raised his brow, and he had calmed just enough that he had more of a somber and indifferent bleak and dry challenge on his face now, in contrast to his panic before. "Well, that changes everything about falling off of the verge of the balcony, then."

You turned your head up as you began to ease your foot onto the dirt path that would lead through the rocks surrounding you, your other hand hitching beside your white dress as you began to walked your way through the small rocks and molded cracked stones surrounding you as you threaded your body through the looming stones. Bojack settled for watching you tentatively, and you could catch the hopeless fear in his eyes as you watched you slink your way through the rocks, only turning your eyes away from Bojack to turn your eyes down to your feet as you continued to walk your way through the rocks, keeping your eyes turned up to the cliff where Bojack was sat beside the verge of it. You gave the occasional swear as you stumbled your way up the dirt road, the bare of your feet occasionally being cut on the side of the cliff and rocks as you kept your hands pressed from one boulder and over to the other as you stumbled your way through the boulders, turning your eyes up to Bojack now and then as you gave him a soft hitch of breath of reassurance while he watched you tentatively.

"Those people didn't come here for some reason that has to do with something annoying I don't have to deal with after all that, does it?"

"They brought something for more than just annoyance."

"I doubt that." Bojack's low and tired eyes followed your movement as your palm detached from the side of the stone, your hand reaching out to Bojack as his eyes followed. His eyes eased up into alertness as he watched your hand reach out, the other one balanced onto the rock as your body leaned forward to where Bojack was sitting beside the verge of the cliff.

"Are they still here?" Bojack's tone was more somber and reflective as he reached out a hand for you to take, natural grace entering his tone as his palms eased beside your hand as he began to pull himself from the verge of the cliff, giving a slight hitch of a breath while he was pulled off of the verge of it, stumbling onto his feet as he tried to find his balance. His expression was low and somber as his eyelids lowered while he watched the step of his feet while he raised himself upright while his palms kept placed into yours. Your other hand began to detached from the cliff while you turned your body further to Bojack and gripped your hand beside his palm, threading beside both of his palms and he took an inward breath and felt your fingertips gripping beside his palms while his stout legs tried to find balance.

"They said they didn't want to leave."

"Why?"

"It would be something easier to figure out if we went down the cliff to ask them."

"Well-yeah. Right." A small shrug of his shoulders. "Sure."

By the time you were only a few inches away from Bojack, you were meeting his tired and dry expression, oddly graceful in his empty question as he watched you balance your arms between two boulders while you turned your head over your shoulder and looked down the dirt path after turning your eyes away the grace of his humble and tentative emotion. He was attempting to execute a dry sense of control; but there was something far too innately human for him to deny it.

"Something about a wedding." Your voice was tentative as you began to help Bojack down the path, keeping your hands pressed against his palm as you did so while you begin to thread your other hand from boulder to boulder, turning your eyes over your shoulder every now and then while your other hand came to ease yourself from rock to rock to keep your balance while your other hand kept cradled beside Bojack's palm while you begin to help him down at the dry path.

"A wedding?"

Bojack's voice had a little bit of ease of curiosity-but then he gave a slight chuckle to accompany the sentence. "Must have been the wrong address for them to come all the way over here. aAd people tell me that I'm disorganized whenever it comes to trying to figure out what goes where. They always get our mail mixed up, the regular people. they can't tell one rich asshole from the other. Gets even more annoying once you begin to realize that they're never going to stop and that they should pay someone exclusively for our mail, but-"

"It actually was in regards to you."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"They said it was from an old friend. Eddie. They said they got the wrong mail a couple of days ago at their own house, and they figured that they may as well come over to properly give you the mail."

"Eddie?"

Bojack's voice raised up into question as he kept his palms eased into your hand, and your head turned over your shoulder a little bit more sharply now as you saw the emotion and the effect of that suddenly overcame his eyes out of the name of his past companion. His eyes turned out and thought as he kept his other hand beside boulder by boulder to keep balance as he continued to follow you down the trail.

"That's weird. haven't seen that guy in years."

He winced in thought while you watched him while you turned your head over your shoulder now and then in between looking forward to the front of the path for the sake of keeping your balance without hurting your toe or scratching your palms even more than you already had.

"So the guys getting married, huh? Interesting. Never thought he would have moved on after everything that I know about him, but-"

A soft, gentle, soulful laugh left his lips, considerate, humble and reflective in a soul that was innately deep and soothing in its sound, and it caused something inside of you to feel a small thrill of warmth of admiration for something as pure as much as his soul as you heard the soft chuckle underneath his breath, feeling the full smoothing purity of how it sounded that gave away his innate precious, tender and lost essence.

"That's actually pretty cute, the thought of him moving on and finding a little bit of peace. Certainly nothing that I would have expected considering the last time that I met him but-" A small hitch of Bojack's consideration as his voice eased into a soft reflection. "It was a long time ago, and it actually almost makes me feel a little bit good to know that something like that could still find hope after everything they've gone through. That's a cute story. A little weird, but-I'm happy for him."

"It was actually in regards to your own wedding. The card said something about him inviting people over for the sake of celebrating your marriage?"

"Oh, come on." Bojack's voice was now edged in annoyance as he continued to follow you, tripping over his feet now and then as his own much less stout agile body would allow as he tried his best to make his way through the boulders. "You don't need to try to tease me like that just because of the conversation that we just had. I don't want you to try to start to spin on narratives or lies-or come up with games just for the sake of trying to expand te conversation."

"He-"

"Listen, me falling off of a cliff-end of story and end of conversation, and certainly the end of you bringing up over and over again and over again, especially after what just occurred that could make it any more clear that it is not going to happen. And that it is clearly for the best for the both of us. You don't have to understand why, but please don't start making cheap jokes about it."

"The card is right in my pocket if you want to read it."

"You're serious?"

'I'll show you at the bottom of the cliff."

Your head turned through the last couple of boulders as you continued to weave through them, and although your hands were currently occupied cradling one with Bojack's palm and the other keeping your balance from one cliff and over to the other, you already were thinking of taking it out for the sake of proving it to him.

"I don't know what it's about or what it's concerning, or if he even meant to have it be dedicated to you. I don't know anything about your past life or about your past friend, but he's under the impression that you're getting married soon."

"Yeah, apparently a lot of people are under that general impression lately. This is the reason why I don't give people the permission to feel like they should feel like they have the right to know what's going on in my personal life in the first place."

You turned your head over your shoulder one last time to look over at Bojack as you saw the soft squint of consideration in his eyes as he turned his expression down and thought and gave a slight shake of his head again, turning his eyes down in thought as he gave a slight shake, emotional consideration and quality of it entering his thought again.

"We weren't really what I would consider friends. I mean-" A mall shrug and a heavy breath as he turned his eyes down and gave a soft roll of his shoulders. "We certainly didn't leave on a good enough note that he would be sending me cards or would even be thinking of anything that would go on in my life, in general, whether good or bad, much less to feel like it's appropriate to throw an entire party or to celebrate it. Qe didn't exactly end on a good note that I haven't talked to him in years anyway." His finger was lifted up adorably, eyes eased in soft consideration, then somberly shrugged as he added; "The usual for me."

His voice seemed as fit held something that was ashamed-he certainly wasn't bragging about the trade of the uneven and very few and far between genuine and meaningful relationships that he could have ever had, and the pattern of the end of them turning into nothing. You head turned as you looked over at him in question one last time before leaving the boulders, but Bojack's eyes were lowered and heavy and occupied in somber, vaguely regretful thought.

You finally stepped over the rest of the pebbles and made your way out as your hand slipped outside of Bojack's, wiping your hands from the slight film of sweat that had been from his nervousness and his skin up against the front of your clothes as you turned while Bojack raised out both of his arms tentatively, expression full of caution while he raised both of his arms beside him as he stumbled his way out from between the two cliffs, giving up a soft hitch as he did so is he stumbled over his feet and over against the side of the stones while he made his way out and over onto the green grass.

"Well, at least we both cleared up where that all went." Bojack's eyes turned to his legs as he wiped off the dirt that had come from the sides of the rocks, kicking his feet to the side as he shook of the dirt with a grimace, eyebrow raised in a dry exasperation.

"You made quite a show. Thank you for doing that. Made it worth the while of coming over here."

Bojack's unimpressed concentration turned up in interruption as he watched where the couple began to walk their way over to Bojack, and after his surprise faded he stood himself upright, as much as ghe battered stout body of himself would allow as the couple walked their way through the grass.

"We're sorry to come all the way over here and cause any discomfort. It was a mice night, and we decided to go for a walk anyway. May as well make one more person's night a little bit clearer in the meantime."

The husband's voice was vaguely tentative in a polite fashion as he spoke, and Bojack gave a soft breath as he looked down at his legs, battered with the blue jeans of his body now tattered, as he kicked his feet.

"No. It's okay. Night was a questionable disaster anyway." Bojack's arms were raised to the side as he kicked some of the rest of the dirt and the cuts off, your own hand coming to grip beside the back of his body as you watched him sway in his discomfort. The heaviness that Bojack carried throughout an ill mind and empty life was clearly tormenting him even as he tried to keep the guise of control of indifference, but you allowed your hand to keep ghosted beside the plush part of his back to keep him upright. His eyes gleamed up in a slight curiosity as he looked between the couple. "When did the card come?"

"What, from your friend?" The husband chuckled as he indicated his head to where you had taken the card out of your pocket, Bojack stepping back as he kept his hands tentiavely pressed beside his chest while he watched the flash of the card being pressed between your fingertips. He saw the flash of the cursive of Eddie, the gold glint threading on the edge of the card. A soft glint of curiosity glimmered in his cheat as he watched you keep the card balance in your fingertips, turning it in the direction of Bojack for him to look at as he tilted his head to the side to catch the words. "It's been there a few days, at least. We weren't sure how to go about telling you when we got it. More than that, we weren't aware that you were getting married, and we wanted to find a right time and place to acknowledge that."

"Funny story. I'm actually not." Bojack's dry eyes turned up to the man as his ears lowered, and the dry defiance on his expression didn't leave his eyes. "But with all the really terrible rumors going on around the city at all times, I'm surprised they managed to reach Eddie."

He winced in a negative focus as he turned his head over the card, and his pupils dialted in some panicked thought that he was clearly trying to control to some degree, despite his words of having a sense of control.

"Well, he seemed to be incredibly excited when we told him. Seemed to have an entire joy and light in his voice like it was something of fact. It was quite an experience for the both of us, really, to hear someone that full of life and belief. He even told us a little bit about his wife, Lorraine, and how he felt her more than ever since he heard the news."

"What?" Bojack's eyes turned up in alert to the woman as his eyes glimmered over her in question, ears perked. His eyes dialed in consideration as he eased his expression down in thought and bewilderment. "I thought she had been dead for years."

"Oh, she was. She still is." The pigeon wife grazed her cheek beside her husband, as if given strength just to the memory. "He talked about her like she was a memory that was so strong that even the idea of her had filled him with far more presence than anything that surrounded him currently. That's the thing about someone who is of genuine connection or quality-even their absence is more valuable than the empty long after they're gone. He was loving and living in the moment, deep and with anguish and loneliness and all, and somehow still finding the deepest virtue of spirit. Rare thing to find these days. Maybe it always was."

The wife turned her head to where you were standing beside Bojack, yourself shrinking as you caught the inquiry of her narrow eyes as she looked you over.

"How long have you been under Bojack's care?"

"A few weeks." The answer came out smooth and easy as anything, and a soft guilt eased in Bojack's eyes at the nature of your gratitude as you spoke it. "It's been a good time in my life. I'm very grateful for it."

"I can tell. From looking at the both of you." The husband's eyes were glimmering with a warmth of admiration of something that seemed to extent from the peace he shared with his wife, and his wife muzzled her cheek further beside his shoulder. Bojack tensed at the feeling of your intimacy and the clear layer of genuine desire behind it, but he clearly didn't have it in him to pull away or to deny the heavy relief that came from it. "I can tell that you that the both of you certainly have plenty of life together that you've shared despite your hardships. Made even richer for it, maybe. There's that light that comes from hope in your eyes."

The husband turned his attention to you, and your eyes flashed as you turned your eyes down, stepping your way further to Bojack as you leaned your body beside his in support. Bojack allowed it to happen this time, and though he was tense with his sickness towards you, he couldn't deny there was something through the resistance that demanded to be felt in its value.

"She's been resting a lot." Bojack's eyes lowered as he turned to you, as if to offer an explanation about how you were was enough to dissipate anything in the question as to whether or not there was anything grander going on that would have extended Bojack to uncomfortability. "Hopefully I'll get her a place where she can rest and find her way a bit, and then that'll be that."

"Did you read the card?" The wife's voice piped up into a hitch of curiosity, and Bojack's eyes threaded down to the card that was placed between your fingertips, feeling a vague jolt go through his body at the clear name of Eddie reflecting back into his vision.

"Did I read about a guy having delusions? No, not especially on the top of my list."

"You should give him a call, at least. Check up on him, get into contact. See what he says and how he says it. I'll tell you, even just to hear the joy in that man's voice is enough to make a little something come by. We both agreed we were a little better off for it."

The wife's voice was gradual in her suggestion and tinted with an authentic soothing nature of what she must have gotten out of it. Bojack's eyes tilted as he turned to meet your expression as your hand gripped beside his arms while your eyes kept in front of you, not seeing mu h of anything except for the occasional glint of your expression across the card as you took the information in.

"That's ok." Bojack's eyes lowered into a respectful resolve, and your eyes turned up to meet his own worn eyes in their defiance as you gazed at him in curiosity. Bojack's eyes closed as a turn of thought overcame his features that would've suggested conflict, but he opened his eyes over to the couple as he gestured to them in vauge gratitude as he spoke, "Thank you, anyway. It's good for us to have some company before I take her out."

"Where?" Your voice was tinted with fear as it spoke, your eyes turning up to Bojack as your hand kept gripped on his arm. Surprise flickered across his eyes as he turned his expression down to meet yours as you gazed at him in the soft red tint of your question.

"Where?" Bojack's eyes turned up in thought. "I don't know. Somewhere where you can get some rest, obviously somewhere you're safe and feel like yourself, and after that we'll shoot up top and go from there. I can't change your circumstances, no one can, but I can make it so that it still feels human, yourself, you know, and that's the important part."

His eyes were winced at the bottom as he spoke with his smile raised nervously. He felt vaguely embarrassed saying the words in front of the couple, as if he were executing or betraying you in front of a couple with a quality enlightened inner life that it felt like a crime. Bojack turned his expression back over to the couple as he looked the both of them over, conflict of chaos in his mind as he tried to find a way to paint te situation as much as he was able to while he turned his eyes up and looked between them, ears lowered.

"Anything else from you two, or was the letter delivering part the main aspect of your visit?"

The husband turned to the wife for a brief moment, and she snapped her own narrow eyes to her husband as she looked at him with inquiry to meet his own. The narrowing of her eyes turned down in vague thought, and her hands squeezed beside her husband's arms as her eyes glittered in conflict. They both seemed bothered and both of them swayed in what seemed line a line of secretive emotional thought, with very little understanding of how to execute the inner tension the both of them were executing. The blue neon fog was increasing right along with their uncertainty, causing the dense of the fog to make it even more of a struggle to make it out between either of them, and Bojack felt his eyes wincing as he tried to see through the dense expanse of it.

"It's just-" The husband paused as he turned his eyes down, pale hand pressing beside his cheek as he did so while he turned his eyes down in conflict. Bojack's hooded eyes lowered as he gave the man a brief nod of permission, trying to keep his impatience to a low: he felt a certain panicked anxiety to get you back inside, to huddle the comfort and the small sense of relief the both of you could find that felt, to Bojack, his own private world of what had given him a minute sense of relief that was precious enough that he wanted to keep it for his own, even as he was intimated and, to a degree, horrified of it.

"Uh-huh?"

The husband rolled his shoulders, then turned his eyes up to Bojack as he looked at him through the blue fog.

"Bojack, sometimes you hear these stories about people and their loved ones, and there's just this profound sense of faith that you become aware of even so much as being the second man to observing it. When Eddie called my wife and I, we both agreed that we got that sense."

"Well, with the way he sounded, it's not a surprise. It sounds like he sold it to you pretty good."

"He did, yes. We felt lighter because of it. It's part of the reason why we came here." The pigeon wife turned her head to her husband, and he gave her a light shrug and a soft nod of his head of his encouragement. "He almost gave us a sense of this-natural hope that we had, and even though we would consider the both of ourselves something that would be full of hope anyway, because we are pretty well off all things considered, we just couldn't help but be affected by the way that he spoke as if he had physically been torn away from that thing that everybody has always craving, but nobody knows how to be able to physically get. The more that we heard him speak and the more that we heard the way he talked about you and your wife, the more that we wanted to know about it. It was like he was in a rhythm with existence that felt as if every single person that we know-maybe even including ourselves in some ways-was full of this connected human hope-and he just seemed so convinced about this idea that he that you had found your wife and that you were getting married and that, somehow, he thought that it was his own value to be able to take it in. He said that it felt like he was reconnected with his wife as if she was tangibility within her, emotionally and physically, and he said that it was like nothing else, that he couldn't believe the amount of grief that he had put up with previously now that he could feel the amount of hope and that when he remembered what it feel like to truly love and to be loved again. He even made a joke that he couldn't believe that it would have been you, but at the same time he said he wasn't really surprised. When he met you he said it was bittersweet, but that he could tell there was more going on than just what it would seem like on the surface, and he said that he wanted more than anything everyone to celebrate the feeling ever since he came to know it."

"Who told Eddie that I was getting married?"

Bojack winced as he spoke the question, ears lowering slightly while he looked between them with a question glimmering in his eyes. When the couple readjusted while turning and looking at one another in what seemed like a wordless mock up of their unknowing, Bojack closed his eyes as he gave a slight shake of his head while he thought it over to try and justify his lack of belief. "It just doesn't make any sense, I don't have any contact with him, and I know that the guy doesn't have any contact with anybody that I would know who would know anything about me here. He's not in tune or connected to anything to do with anyone from where he comes from, so it wouldn't make any sense why he would suddenly be concerned or even be aware of anything like this unless the guy suddenly started traveling and went to a place where even has access to magazines or the internet." He chuckled, lightly, though it was barely suppressed by the clear nervousness he had in his tone as his bottom eyes winced as the tentativeness eased on his expression. "He barely even has a TV that works. He must have gone out of his way to make himself apart of this business central."

"Bojack, it's okay."

Your hand squeezed against the side of his arm, and he turned his head to the side in question as he squinted at you in thought, though he allowed his arm to be gripped firmly into your hand without turning away. You gave him a small nod even as a sickness in your eyes was protruded against the red edge of your eyes as your lips raised up while you gazed at him with a soft reassurance while your hand squeezed beside his arm in reassurance. He pulled away a little bit-but he couldn't truly resist the way that he could feel the natural rhythm of what you were giving him as your hands kept gripped beside his arm in an attempt of offering him gentleness and reassurance; even and especially because you could tell how aggravated he was getting.

"I think we'd both feel better if we didn't encourage people coming in with commentary to our business."

Your eyes turned down, your palms gripped beside Bojack as your lips pressed together in thought, and when your eyes turned back up to meet his there was a deeper insistence in your eyes. "I think what they're really trying to tell us, more than anything else, is that they just want to have confirmation that there is something good to believe in here, and I think that we can both agree that, if nothing else, no matter what's happening on a technical level, that we both felt it."

"What would you want us to do with them, then?"

"I don't know. Asking the to leave would be a start, don't you think?"

"Bojack."

"No. They don't know what they're talking about."

Bojack lifted up his arm up away from your hand a few inches as he looked over you with a lift of a challenge up against his eyes, and you flicked your eyes downward while you allowed him to ease his arm out of your grasp, there seeming to be a hollowing distance in your eyes as you tilted your head downward and gazed in front of you in thought; but you allowed Bojack to release himself nonetheless. Bojack looked over at you with his tense inquiry as you rolled your shoulders and turned your eyes upward and looked between the two people in front of him. There must have been something in your eyes that would have caused Bojack to feel a sense of resignment, because his aged eyes closed for a moment as he tried to recenter himself, turning his dim eyes over to the people in front of him as he gave a small breath.

"Listen, I appreciate you coming over here. I do, I don't-I get a lot of company, and most of the time I don't want it or need it but, I do appreciate it. I'm just not so about the marriage advice." He turned his tentative eyes over to you as he looked you over, and though your eyes met his, you didn't seem to have as many answers as he would have liked; your eyes were as bewildered as much as he was, and yet that compelling layered emotional look in your expression was one that was reminiscent of his own. "I have my mind made up on that."

"We didn't just come here because of Eddie." Bojack's questioning eyes turned back to the wife as he watched her turn her eyes over to her husband, and he gave her a small nod of permission through the blue dark fog that surrounded the space while he gazed at her with increased encouragement. The husband kept his eyes on her with something that seemed to communicate something within the balance of their uncertainty of how to be able to do that of which had been so human and compelling that it had encouraged them to run the errand in the first place. "We did come here because we got that mail, initially, that was the main reason. But when Eddie called us with that amount of joy in his voice, we both agreed there was something about the way he talked about you that was desperate for us to follow it, to encourage it, something that called to us that we've been looking for for a long time. We've both been trying to look for someone that would feel like that person of joy we've been looking for for a long time. The person who seems to have that sense of a spirituality to them of something that they figured out that's beyond fame or beyond having a name or value or everything else that people desperately try to come up with for the sake of feeling like that they can have a sense of what is robbed from others, and every single time that we try our to find anything or anyone with that pure feeling.

"So-like most people, then." Bojack's voice was blunt and straightforward. "Trying to find that surreal little thing or that passion."

"Yes. But my husband and I were always on a larger move and seeker towards it. Especially in the past couple of years. We talked to some people now and then, occasionally had a good couple or a word with people that seemed as if they were content well enough within their lives, and it gave us a little bit of bond for awhile. We've lived on this street for awhile-I'm a designer for Hollywood deigns and my husband assists in directing certain movies-but somehow it always ended up pointing back over to you."

Bojack's head tilted back. "Me? You mean-recently. As in tonight?"

"Every now and then. My wife and I have had suspicions and such and the like of the general direction of your house being met by our attention whenever we were following this spiritual sense of enlightenment. I know it sounds a little bit ridiculous, the idea of us turning and looking over to you specifically, and we're not saying you have to perform or prove anything, but-I will say that being here now, even though you say that you're not getting married and that she's not your wife that even just being between the both of you, we would have to try we would have to disagree. There were directions that lead to your house a few nights were the clouds seemed as if they were forming a literal pointing over to your house with a powerful and deft hand over to the direction of your mansion. It was impossible to ignore most nights, and occasionally I would wake up my wife after an empty day and we would together watch the beauty of it as the clouds expanded over your house, like a literal cluster of something waiting to be released, suffocating in and of itself while it clustered over the building. All things considered, the nights when my wife and I were aware of it, and sat by the window we saw the beautiful neon lights coming out of it. We attributed it to lighting back then. But now-we feel like it may lead to a different kind of beauty."

"She's not my wife." Bojack said the statement with confident defiance, even as a little bit of weakness entered the edge of his tone as he spoke it, and the insecurity entered in his eyes as he twisted his expression over to you while you turned your eyes up and met his with the profound sadness in the red of your eyes, mixed in with bewilderment as he felt the sentiment within that he hardly knew what to do with as he met your expression that was more powerful and demanded more from him than he knew what to do with. "She's just someone where we've both been having a decent time taking care of one another. We have no intention of marrying.' He gave you a slight lowering of warning in his aged and hooded eyes as he spoke; "And, if she's been paying attention, she would know that is for the best for her, too."

"I know." The husband's voice was earnest as he spoke. The blue fog was now getting so dense to the point that Bojack could barely see in front of him, and they were now more so silhouettes against the blue dark fog that surrounded them, though he could still sense their careful air. in His eyes winced as he turned his head up and over towards the sky as he felt the thickness of the dense fog that was surrounding him, turning his expression upward as he did so while he squinted his eyes through the blue light that was surrounding him and the black velvet of the blue sky that surpassed by his expression.

He closed his eyes as he gave a deep intake of his breath while he rolled his shoulders and shook his head lightly. The blue fog surrounding him was adding to the eternal fog of the night, and it seemed to be increasing in its denseness.

"You should go to bed." Bojack opened his eyes as he turned his tired expression over to you, and your eyes raised up as he met the exhaustion of his emotion. "Please do, actually." His dim eyes turned as he looked at the couple in front of him. "We can continue this without so many minds getting polluted all at the same time, at the very least."

"We just wanted you to know that we've come to notice that you have something special, and you should keep it with you. I don't think you realize what you're giving away, or what you're sacrificing, or the possible amount of suffering that could come out of it if you don't cling to anybody who gives you even the slightest extent of the humanity within it. My husband and I have already seen and have been taking away from the beauty of it even from a distance."

Bojack's already aged and puffy sleep deprived eyes winced as he looked between the both of him, head titled back as his ears flew back while he gazed between them with defiance.

"No. I'm not rejecting anything." His voice was full of an edge even as your hands gripped further beside against him as you spoke his name softly, as if in an attempt to keep him held back, and he turned his head as he looked over you, his expression dimmed as he could hear your despair that was clearly within your voice as you tried your best to keep him by you.

"This is exactly what I'm talking about." Bojack tried to raise his arm away from your hand as he gave you a sharp glint of his eyes. A new insistence hardness entered his eyes as his face tensed while he reached out a hand and placed it on the middle of your back as he indicated his attention to the side of the house. "Please, go upstairs."

"What if they're right?" Your head snapped over you shoulder as you gazed at him in the red edged tint of your desperate insistence, and Bojack's eyes flared in his confliction as he turned his head away and shook his head lightly with a soft swear. "We've both had an agreement with a lot of things, Bojack. Why can't this be one of them, if not the dispair that's within hope if we don't keep by one another? Whatever it is, it doesn't have to make sense."

He gave a soft hitch of protest, but his hand fell away from the middle of your back as his eyes hardened in consideration. Though it was challenging and, to some degree, motifying, he felt less alone in the wake of your open and conflicted emotion, and there was a sense of comfort and togetherness about it that he couldn't have denied that felt as if it would be the equivalent to pulling teeth to reject. In the many days that he felt he was on of the very few people that had ever truly suffered or that ever had ever genuinely suffered, his conviction throughout his life that he was the only one who had ever felt the amount of pain and isolation to the extent that he had had only increased, so much to the point where there had been a maddening sense of surreality surrounding him all day every day that seemed as if he was the only one that was so desperate and broken in his humanity and looking for others to be able to solve it, and only seeming as if he was told by other people that seemed as if they were upright and perfectly fine and full of rejection and arguments and opinions and attacking of others that it seemed as if there was something inherently wrong or weak about him, as of a different species, as if he was weak and pathetic for desperately looking for the kindness in the face of others that was never there unless he gave them some sort of equally superficial transaction.

He comforted by you and the way you wore your emotions on your slave in a way Bojack inherently was soothed by, and as you looked him over as he winced and looked over towards the couple beside him, he saw the way that the blue fog began to increase up between their disposition-it was an ultimately welcoming sort of trail that seemed as if it saw him for everything that he had been searching for and previously had only been invalidated or even made fun of for- nothing except for an ache upon of an egg so much to the point that he had wondered how we ever could Harbor it everyday and at the constant conviction that there was nothing to be done except to wait for it to take him from the inside out. For previously it had seemed an impossible dream for that part of the biggest narrative of ache in him for it to be invalidated and much less satisfied-and now seemed as if it was fully resoundingly seen or previously it only would have been a dream, if even that much.

"Bojack, we came here for the sake of trying to make sure that we could try to solve that joy. it's a good thing, and I think we can both agree that we feel right here. Don't discourage that." The husband stepped forward, though by now the details of his expression were folded under the fog.

"I don't-" Bojack's eyes darted frantically to the side as he half stepped his way back. "I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying. I've had a lovely time with her, but-I don't understand why that's your business. I don't understand why it's Eddie's business. Why you would feel the need to come over here and to try to build or invite yourself as if it's something that needs or wants to be done. I'm taking care of her. I don't need any help."

"We understand that it's hard to try to find hope after being sick for so long. I can feel the sickness between the both of you"

Bojack's eyes flared at the woman. "No, I'm not sick. That's not the problem. And I would appreciate you taking that for the promise that it is and running with it." Bojack's eyes winced through the dark blue fog as he stepped forward a foot, attempting to see over the path and the several valleys of the hills from the house of where they had come from. "Shouldn't you be getting back? It's getting late."

The wife turned her head through the dark blue fog as she turned her head down to where her hands were gripped beside her husband's. Bojack's eyes followed her movement, and he felt a slight sting at her expression of what seemed like a vague challenge in her eyes that seemed to be buried in a desperate insistence. Bojack stepped back, a pout of bewilderment on his features as he watched her reach out a hand and thread it beside her husband's palm. There was a defiance and agreement between them; thick and confident, if not a little bit weary.

"One thing that I've learned from the wisdom of being truly loved, which has extended from myself and my husband and I'm sure something that you're aware of yourself, is that love is ultimately inspired from something that is neither affected by either bad circumstance or a good one. There's only circumstance, and the lack of faith that people have to decide that they should be in a certain interpretation of the circumstance. But nothing can truly take you away from your own spirit. Especially in bondage of another. The extension of the love that we've had together has been able to give the both of us that more than ever before."

"This woman hasn't taught me anything." Bojack's eyes lowered as he looked at the woman with vague defiance, ears lowered, stout body slouching. "She hasn't taught me anything but allowing the both of us to have some reassurance for a little while. It's not this profound lesson. We're just two people trying to help one another out, is all." His eyes lowered in vague sarcasm as he added; "It was going great, up until this point."

He heard a soft hitch of your voice that would have suggested an emotion that was uncomfortable, and Bojack turned his eyes over to you as he tried to catch where you were in your emotional narrative, his body slouching awkwardly as he did so while he looked you over as he tensed. Bojack turned to you fully as he watched the emotion of conflict pass over your expression, blinking rapidly in his question as you turned your head up to meet his own eyes as you gave him a slight unreadable look that made him feel an extension of guilt and shame. His eyes flicked between the couple hidden behind the fog and you, and with a quick and frantic resolve of his uncertainty did he turn to you, bottom puffy eyes winced and ears lowered as he gestured lightly over around the edge of his house. Your eyes looked delicate, sickly, the red on the edge of them easing into Bojack's frantic thought and quick paced panic as he took in the complicated sickliness of your eyes.

"You know what? Why don't you go inside." He turned as he gestured around the side of the house, and your eyes blinked frantically, as if you were coming out of your deep emotional trance that you were buried in from which Bojack had accidentally thrown you in with his conflict of how to deal with the situation. He needed to appease his own guilt, anyway, from rejecting what the both of you felt a draw towards. Your eyes turned up to Bojack in question, your expression as gentle and motherly and unreadable as ever."You've had a long day. Probably best that you don't hear conversations like this." He turned his dry eyes over to where the couple was now almost entirely drenched by the neon light, the haze now seeming as if it was more of a pollution more than anything else now. "I'll try to handle the committee crew over here."

"I think that you should have the wedding."

The wife spoke the suggestion so abruptly, cutting through the haze of the complacey Bojack was going everything in his power to keep exalted as the main essence of the conversation, so much so that it caused Bojack's eyes to widen with the blunt suggestion. The surprise mainly came from the truth that was hidden within the statement that Bojack had wanted to deny the existence of, and his cowardliness loathed for it to be in the open.

"Why do you care?" Bojack's eyes were glaring in their defiance, though there was more fear in his expression now more than there was any genuine anger.

"Thank you."

Bojack's eyes snapped over to you as he heard your statement, warm and welcoming, if a little bit weak in its emotion. Your hands had eased away from Bojack's arm, stepping back lightly as Bojack looked over at you with inquiry in his insecure and panicked insecurity.

"I don't blame him for not wanting to think about it." Your eyes turned up to Bojack, and he turned his eyes away as he eased his expression down in a dry reflection. "And I don't blame him for not wanting to go through with it. But I would have loved to. Or to at least try."

Bojack's eyes flickered in a soft thought, clear emotional heaviness present within his eyes as your words took the narrative in his expression. He loathed the warm invite, of the genuine and deep joy that he felt like it was a tangible promise if he were to go to it that was so present within him even at the suggestion that he hardly knew what to do with himself at the suggestion of the certainty of it. He certainly didn't bother trying to turn away from you this time, and he allowed his palm to be teased by the soft touch of your fingertips, though he neither responded nor encouraged it.

His wet and uncertain eyes flickered over to the wife as he looked her over. Your hands and fingertips swept beside Bojack, and his eyes flicked over to you as he looked you over, stepping his way back as you gave him a small pipe and raise of your lip as you looked at him in an attempt of reassurance as much as you could muster, though there was clearly a stab of pain within it that ghosted across your expression that you were trying to pierce for his sake. Your fingertips ghosted across his palm as he gazed at you with the guilt snapping in his eyes as the age of hs face wincing in thought as he looked you over, and with a soft squeeze of your hand in agreement to Bojack's suggestion did you promise that you would make your way inside.

"Thank you again." Your voice was low and soft with welcome as you looked at the couple, the layer of your emotional complicated melancholy still present, but there seemed to be a weary acceptance in your eyes now. Your fingertips threaded outside of Bojack's palm, and he gave a soft noise of protest as he felt your hand fall away from his palm. His eyes winced as he watched you make your way around Bojack's house, himself turning as he tried to speak a protest; but you were in rhythm with your resolve, arms pressed beside the small of your chest as you began to walk your way around the the side of the steaks of Bojack's house and up and over to the driveway. The guilt in Bojack's eyes only thickened as he turned and watched you make your way inside, the small of your body turned in on itself as you walked your way around the house with your head titled down, as small and as fragile as much as you ever were, and the guilt and black punishment inside Bojack increasing. He felt his hand gesture out, but his stout fingertips found their way beside his palm again, teeth poked as he watched you with that twisting of guilt on his features.

'Have the wedding, Bojack."

The husband said it bluntly this time as Bojack's eyes flickered in frantic thought, then winced as he turned his attention over and between the couple. They had stepped forward a few more paces, their faces still muddled through the dark blue, but still visible through the emotion in their eyes and the buried wrinkles of their features. Bojack's eyes winced as he looked between them, giving a soft hitch of an uncertain breath as he tried to calm the rumble of his frantic thought.

"You're at a time in your life where you've lived your life and you know who you are." The wife's voice was soft and confident in her tone as she spoke, though Bojack could feel himself becoming aggravated by the truth of it and how it intermelded with his own. "That's a strength-or it can be, when it comes to who you know you should dedicate yourself to."

Though Bojack's emotion was more subtle with his conflict now, he shook his head lightly, pressing his hand beside his snout as he tried to recenter himself. "There's no wedding to have if I'm not getting married or have any intention of doing so. For a couple, it seems like you're not exactly enlightened about what that means."

"I understand you're both sick."

"No. That's not-"

"We're sick too, I think that everybody is." The husband's voice accompanied his wife's gentle tones of suggestions, his hand coming to squeeze beside hers. "But the fact that you found something that gave you from the slightest bit of relief, so much to the point that we can feel and we can recognize it ourselves- that's not something that either of you should ever dare to try to take for granted."

"I'm not taking it for granted. I never had the intention of dragging her along with me, and if you understood what you were asking, you would see that this is the least selfish thing I could ever do for her." His eyes were tired and lowered in emotion as he added; "I don't understand why that's a hard concept for you to get yourselves around. I'm not like you. Nothing good or soothing is going to come out of this."

"Sometimes, giving up and giving in, even if it feels to you like the worst thing you could do or the most terrifying, is the only and best thing. Letting yourself fall entirely. My husband and I certainly have gotten that sense, even as passage byers, and we discovered it ourselves some time ago."

"Yeah? Well, that's you."

Bojack's voice was becoming increasingly more edged, but there was a defeat of authenticity to his tone as well, his pupils dilated in panicked thought. He turned his head over his shoulder as he saw the way you were walking away back over to the front of his house, your form disappearing behind the corner of his mansion. His head turned over his shoulder fully as he winced and watched the way you were intentionally detaching yourself away from the context of the conversation the way he had wanted, and yet even as he had control over the situation, his sense of increased despair continued.

Even as he watched you disappear around the corner, confirming that he had won the balance of the argument of where the conversation was going, he felt the black sense of going too far in the wrong direction increase. He winced as he watched your form until it disappeared behind the corner of the house, and in the minute narrative behind the chaos of his mind he was already beginning to accept that he was letting you go, and he felt his shame overcome him as he saw the way with you began to disappear around the building, though the haze of the blue fog made it next to impossible for him to see you clearly at all, and he was almost grateful for the deniability.

He did, admittedly, feel a little bit of relief that the heaviness of your presence was leaving right along with the meaning of it, even as he began to feel the hauling emptiness coming back full form that was now taking your place, and the forced and full of him having to commit to the emptiness of what was in front of him now and the attempt of the reinvention of it. He gave a breath as his eyes rolled in his emotional exhaust as he scratched the back of his neck while he turned to look between the couple that still had that air of insistence following Bojack; he couldn't have denied their confidence for anything. He gave a soft breath of a reset as his palms came to play with his wrists while he threaded his hands beside his chest, turning his eyes down in thoughtful conflict.

"Look, I appreciate you coming over here and your advice, but I had no intention to marrying that one." His eyes rolled up in voyage annoyance as he added; "Or any woman, or anyone in general for that matter. It's not for me. It never has been, and I don't believe in it." His arm gestures in front of him as he gazed at the both of them pointy; "So, you don't have to waste your time and your energy. Believe me, there's plenty of other people that are much easier to convince other than me that will give you that same joyful feeling if you're really that intimate wit the notion of appeasing and encouraging marriages."

"I understand." The wife nodded as the white of her feathered head eased beside the shoulder of her husband. "And yet, I don't think that any of us can agree that this is where it's all going long term. And the problem is that we don't want to leave you to figure that out on your own, and we certainly don't want to miss an opportunity to help you or to see it unfold ourselves. And I don't think you want to deny that, either."

Bojack stepped his way back as his eyes lowered in somber and fearful thought, looking between them tentatively as he raised his hands up tentatively and waved them in a vague rejection, tentative and apologetic, but still grounded in its decision.

"I would appreciate it if the both of you left." He turned his emotive eyes back over to where you had disappeared now entirely around the corner of the house, his hand coming to rest beside his arm as he focused on where you had disappeared, rubbing his palm up and down against his arm lightly. His eyes lowered in thought as he added; "You know how it is with these things, anyway. I have a lot I have to work out with the woman to make sure she gets somewhere safe. She has a lot more going on than whether or not she can mess around with legal papers, anyway. I need a lot of time with her these next few days to make sure that she's going to be okay and that she actually knows she can mean it when she says she trusts me and that it's not just a font. I have to do what I can to make sure that she gets to a good place, that it's not just another terrible ending on a string of everything that she's already known that has already been a terrible ending. It's not easy but-" He gave a light shrug as the heaviness eased in his sad eyes while he gave a light shrug and turned into himself. "If that's the only thing that her possibilities consists of, then I'll have to do the best I can with her. And I'm going to try my best not to blame myself for, that or to feel bad for it."

"But that's the thing, Bojack." The man stood forward with the wife threaded up against his arms as he looked over Bojack with an insistence as his eyes glimmered in insistence, even through the dense blue fog. Bojack's eyes snapped up as he looked him over while his eyes winced with an as he stepped back a few paces, if only to keep himself from the thickened emotional tension between himself and the couple. "You don't have to do any of that, not to yourself, not to us, not the world or to that woman especially."

Bojack's voice was somer and insistent as he spoke, with a light defiance in his tone;"This has nothing to do with anyone other than her and I. You don't need to bring the public to this."

"You're well known enough that it concerns other people, right?"

"Well, I-"

"-And my wife and I also concerned ourselves with it as well just by the virtue of natural observation. The world desperately needs more good in it, Bojack. If there's anything your wife and yourself can come up with within that-"

"No. She's not my wife, man."

"-The world would benefit to take it in. For the sake of yourself, that woman, what you feel, and for there to be another truly pure thing on this earth. The world needs it more than ever, even if only in small minute ways that it's granted. If you ask me, I think that you should be brave enough to step over to what you may think is the unthinkable- which really is the only good or the decent thing that you ever could or should have done in the first place. And you can't deny that. If we feel it, I know it must be demanding from your end."

Bojack didn't say anything this time, but rather turned his eyes down in somber thought, hand grazed beside his shoulder as his eased his eyes downward. The man turned his head to his wife, and she gave him a small nod as she gazed at him in insistence, contentment, and confidence in her eyes that was enough to make Bojack step back further, if only to try and protect himself from the compelling insistence she had that made more sense than Bojack was comfortable with, feeling the rubble of the stones underneath his feet as he did so as his eyes tensed tentatively as he looked between them.

"Do you really think that's a good idea?" His voice was more somber now, broken down as he spoke it, and the couple was clearly induced into the insistence they were successfully giving him in the detail of their empathy that caused them to feel as if they saw and were in rhythm with his pain; and he couldn't deny the sense of it.

"I think you should think about it, go for it, go towards her and do anything that you can to make it even just a little bit easier for the both of you. To try to reject something that is so clearly etched out towards the both you to give yourselves relief, to give us relief to see something pure; to follow that sense of want and hope and something that's so clearly full of joy that even complete strangers could have been able to see it. That's going to carry the both of you through any kind of detrimer of devastation that this world knows so inevitably well. I don't think that you should cheapen the fact, and should enjoy every detail and every moment of life that you have within her. I can sense there's a lot, and even your cowardliness and conflict is somewhere where she can find comfort within you. To invent. But first you have to be willing to believe in it yourself."

Bojack's eyes turned tentatively to where you had disappeared, his hands kept onto his palms. He turned his timid eyes up to the story of the first floor of his house that sat on the pikes as he turned his eyes up, stepping back as he watched the stagnant lights turn on the living room that signified you were inside. His eyes turned down in quick and tentative thought, expression tense as he stepped back in conflicted ease.

"I'll need to read the card." Bojack turned his head to the couple as he gave them a small nod. "At the very least I can clear things up with her to show her that there's nothing she needs to feel was cheapened. I don't know what Eddie thinks happened, but he doesn't get to pollute her mind right before I'm trying to convince her that the best thing she can do is not be entangled. She can talk to him and at least get the gist that it's all just delusions. Does that answer your question, by any chance?"

"The fact that my wife and I, as well as Eddie-someone that you say that shouldn't even have access to be even be aware of it-should be something that should be completely and resoundingly enjoyed. I know it's a devastating thing to have to try and get used to a sickly and lonely life and to finally get used to it, to get just enough the right tools to be able to readjust yourself so that you can get through every minute trying to find a compensation for the pain, but I also know just as well that whatever it is that will reward you for stepping forward to something new, and whatever it is that she's promising you, it's your job at this point, as far as my wife and I can feel and even as far as your former friend as you call him, can feel. The insecurity that you feel right now, the pain, the uncertainty, the wretchedness- none of it is going to last. But what is going to last is this constant call that you seem to continuously ignore, and you have been granted this certain kind of gift of a promise that is within your heart that you should make your purpose to follow."

Bojack breathed in with an ease of a tension as he closed his eyes and turned his head down in tense thought. But he opened the emptiness of his eyes again as he looked between them, earnest in his exhaust.

"Do you really think that after everything I'm known for, the way woman see me, the relationships I've had, that I would be able to commit to a marriage?"

"I can sense your sickness and your misery, and I can sense just how completely and deeply you are suffering you are within yourself, and I know what it feels like to be with somebody that has a fellow sickness. Until I found my wife and until I found the small minute island of relief within her, nothing in my life made any sense, and I didn't feel as if I was even worthy of being human, as if everybody else was passing by around me, but none of it actually had anything to directly do with me; as if I was on a different species with an entirely different fate, and to an extent, every day of the emptiness sent me into a complete sense of constant profound despair. That was all that there was, and for a long while I resigned myself to the fate that that was all there ever would be."

Bojack caught the flash of the man's eyes as he turned his expression towards his wife, her eyes glistening with some compelling and powerful emotion even through the haze, his eyes turned to his wife as she turned to met his, her hand gripping beside his, and the rarity of their bond was enough to make Bojack feel a certain profound pain at observing something so human. The less he had had it in his life, the harder it was to observe it; the absence of it in his life left far too much of an ache of an emptiness for the stimulation of the observation to not overcome him in full. "But it turns out that hope, as much as it can feel it's only in small specks of islands every now and then, and as much as it can feel as if it's given to anybody other than to yourself, is a speckle of hope that is strong and enduring enough that it will find you and will come to you a few allow it to-but first you have to have the open space to allow it to. And with that, action. It's all incredibly simple, really; almost too simple for people to believe in it."

"I don't know."

Bojack's eyes flickered in thought, troubled and thick, as he lightly turned his head over his shoulder to where you had disappeared, vague tint of regret in his eyes. "I don't think-" A soft breath of conflict as he thought. "-The last thing that I would ever want is to commit myself to anybody, and I made that realization a long time ago. People-" He winced in emotion, eyes distant in the long narrative of his thought. "-It's devastating-but people, the weirdest thing and the most ironic thing about being in the species is that people aren't meant to love each other. It certainly always seemed so whenever I had to try to deal with them long term, or whatever I tried to make love with someone long term."

"Is that right?" The pigeon wife's eyes glimmered in the dark blue fog, her eyes sparkling while stretching out through the air in the glinted inquiry of her emotion.

Bojack turned his eyes down in thought for a somber moment, and then he added; "I think so. In my fleeting but dense experience, people aren't really meant to take care of each other as much as they are just to destroy each other ruin each other's lives and cause problems over complicated lives that didn't need the extra weight. It's exhausting to live it, and even more exhausting to see it happen over and over again like some universal truth."

"And that has anything to do with what you feel for this woman?"

Bojack's eyes winced with another hard glare as he snapped his expression up and gazed at the pigeon wife definitely. "I've seen it with friends and with my own short relationships and countless other times of general universal stories of others until I realized that it wasn't really so much something that should be permanent as much as it's something that you had to accept as a fact."

'Bu do you feel it with her?"

The pigeon's eyes were so piercing and intense in their question, even through the blue foggy haze that Bojack's eyes took to turning downward as the muscles eased in uncertain thought as the emotion overtook his unknowing.

"No. It's not the same thing. She-" Bojack cut himself off with a somber breath, increasingly more intense emotion eased in his eyes as he turned his expression downward. "-She needs to work her own life out. And I'm ok with doing that for her. But-" He paused, as if it would be a difficult thing to admit as the words were eased in their layer of conflict and emotion; "Not marriage."

The wife stepped forward, her white hand detaching from the arm of her husband momentarily as she pinned Bojack down with an especially insistent gaze that seemed to intertwine entire narratives of emotion in her own expression that was true and deep enough that Bojack couldn't help but turn his conflicted eyes up to meet her own compelling belief and narrative.

"I know that it feels like good things or hope should be feared or avoided or considered, and feels like it wasn't made for you, that it must be twisted in some sort of corrupted way that's not meant for you either after having nothing for so long. I know you've had nothing but despair and sickliness of a life as a freedom or if anything other than this could even exist within the realm of possibility."

"No. I'm not in denial of anything. I just know how things play out. I'm too experienced at this point to deny myself anything otherwise. That's not the same thing as 'fearful faith', or whatever theme yourself and your husband think I'm harboring."

"But you're acting in the same realm of that narrative, Bojack. But once you jump over and get to that freedom, you'll never even be able to believe that you ever denied it to yourself in the first place."

She turned as she looked over at her husband, and he gave her a small nod of his agreement as he stepped forward, reaching out his hand to thread beside her as their fingers intertwined. There were small neon blue cuts that danced around their fingertips as their palms intermelded against one another, neon lights that cut and danced around their hand, and Bojack gave a slight somber surprised breath seeing the neon cuts and flashes cut through the interaction of their palm, not unlike a dance of neon that snapped through their fingers as beautiful as much as the clouded overpass of the neon light that had sat above Bojack's house they had described, and for a moment did a wonder come over Bojack at the vision of it.

"We know it's hard, if not impossible, to overcome the sickness of what surrounds you. To not fall and be entirely complacent in it."

"I'm not being complacent. I'm being the opposite." Bojack's eyes darted to where you had disappeared, his flickering in panic as he did so while his fingertips rested beside his wrists. "I need to go inside and talk to her. Help her out." His eyes darted between the couple in conflicted thought as his eyes snapped between them, emotion on his expression tentative. "Are you done with trying to convince me otherwise? Because I think that's the best thing I can do for her."

"We're not trying to tell you what to do or how to do it."

"Really." Bojack's eyelids lowered, and he kept that defiance in his air. "Because it would seem like you are, and for someone that you couldn't possibly predict the long term result of-which I promise you I do."

"We're trying to lead you down the path that we feel is going to be the most beneficial. For all of us."

"I'm sorry. Why is that your business?"

The wife turned her head to her husband, and through the dark blue and dense fog could Bojack see the emotion of their connection, the wife pressed her lips together in the complication of her thought. The slight cuts of the neon light beside their hands continued, a small peeking and poking through their hands beside the dance of the neon light that was flashing between their palms while their fingers turned and squeezed beside one another in an intertwined and focused agreement; easing together in their rhythm of their uncertainty and desperately gripping onto the few small trails of relief the world allowed them, and Bojack certainly felt that suffocation himself.

"You can do anything at any time. You live your entire life being changed by your nature of following the normal of the people around you, and you take that as the only choice, and as if anything else is insanity. But if the people are sick, all you're doing is making yourself sick, Bojack, and there's no fate in being sick, or any reason to follow it." The wife indicated her head up to Bojack's building. "That woman has the capacity to offer you something that is behind everything you crave. Go to it. Don't deny it. The relief that you can offer yourself in the sickliness of humanity isn't much, but it makes a world of a difference between those who are in dispair, and those who have the nerve to save themselves."

Her husband's hand tapped beside the back of her hand her lightly, and she turned as she offered him a small statement of a whisper while she turned to him and gave him a nod of what seemed like a soft agreement between them.

Bojack snapped his eyes to where he saw their fingers threading beside one another through the peeking of the neon light, and the muscles on his face tense in conflict as he kept his hands gently threaded beside his palms as he felt a the chaos ease between the guilt of his uncertainty. He stepped his way back further, turning his head over his shoulder as his bottom puffy eyes winced while he turned his conflicted expression around the building.

"Listen, if you leave nearby, maybe we can have a larger talk sometime." His eyes winced as ears lowered while he continued to step his way back, and he gestured his hand over his shoulder as he added; "I gotta go. I need to make sure she's grounded. She shouldn't have to worry about all of this and have to worry about leaving the house like I asked her. It's too much for her." His eyes eased into a guilty, tentative and apologetic thought as he gave a conflicted whimper of uncertainty and added; "I'm sure the both of you can agree that not a lot of people are given emotional consideration. I can save one more person from being that sick." His hand gestured to his chest in earnest as he looked between the both of them. "I promise, that's all I'm trying to do."

The husband turned his head down, and there seemed to be a weight to the action as his head eased forward, breathing in as he rolled his shoulders, and the question in Bojack's eyes eased in tentative question as he saw the weight roll around the request of the man's air.

"Bojack." He turned his eyes up as his expression pierced through the fog with and through emotion only. "I'm sure you can feel how wrong and sick things are. Most people do, but they live under a foggy deniability of it and take that as their reality and see it as all there is or ever has been. I know you feel the healing of being beside something that is human, true and genuine. You can spend the rest of your life drinking and sitting and turning in thought and staying on the ground while certain few others fly and experience, or you can take and see the endless possibility that is spanning in front of you and that has always been there without rejection. For the most part, human psychology exists just to destroy itself. But there's always a unique and individual way for your own truth, and we want to ease your path to that clarity. You don't have to suffocate under foggy abuse of the world or humanity for the rest of your life. With the beauty of what we've seen from afar, I would say that it would almost be a requirement for you to do so. I don't know if there's some force beyond what we have that is so innate in experience that it speaks to us in such literal ways that we doubt its existence and take it as unremarkability and even as a denial of its existence, but the signs are there, shouting."

"Yeah. For you." Bojack's voice was edged as he spoke now, and he heard the doors sliding open, turning his head up as he turned around now fully and heard where you were walking your way out, your feet walking across the porch, and Bojack's eyes wincing as he turned his head up and heard you walk across the porch pool. "I have to go. Thank you for-the letter, anyway. At least it's something that I can be aware of instead of the idiot spewing joy out of his lips of total delusion and spreading it out to make it other people's problem. I'll be sure to take care of it."

"Understand that we came here because we felt that guidance and that light of that of what you found, the both of you, and we were so touched by it that we felt the need to come here to make it our own. Despair and hope, Bojack- the most ironic thing about it is that the two things inherently go hand in hand, and what you share and what you have together and with one another is something that inspired the both of us." The wife's eyes were glimmering in insistence, the gleam of her eyes meeting Bojack's as the emotion in her eyes were of a similar demanding narrative.

"Ok, but-"

"It took us a long time to figure it out ourselves, and every day is still a journey, but we did figure it out, and we both know that if you can do much of the same then you can as well. As to why we care, the good that we give out to others will be to our benefit as well. You don't have to be sick and small, Bojack. You don't have to feel like another unremarkable countless grimy number." She turned her wide eyes up to her husband, and he turned as he gave her a nod while her hands gripping further beside his palms, causing the neon light to jut out with an even further neon cut of an extension through their visibility. "We're not powerful, but we found our inner truth, and that has been everything."

"I know that I can make the choice." Bojack's hand cramped beside his chest as he began to step his way further back, and this time the couple didn't step forward with any insistence, though he could feel the affect of their emotion. Though the muscles on his face were tense, his pupils turned between the both with an attempt of leverage above the both of them. "I can make any choice that I want. This isn't about whether or not I think that I can have a choice. This is about the idea of whether what's best for her, who she actually is versus who I actually am, and I'm too old and I've made too many mistakes-" His eyes widened in guilt as his eyes protruded as he spoke the words, and his eyes turned down, hallow in their emotion of the haunting of his narrative. "-I've made too many mistakes to deny that I can't see that happiness shouldn't be pursued now. Not that kind of happiness. I understand why I'm unhappy, I understand why things are the way they are-and my best peace now is to resign to that."

'But you have a centerment having nothing to do with anyone else, Bojack. And it's suffering."

Bojack closed his eyes, breathing in as his ears lowered further back.

"You can quote my review of myself to whoever it is that has known me for the past couple of years." His eyes lowered to the side in heavy reflection. "It doesn't matter anymore. I don't care. I'm just trying to go through the motions of doing the things that I can to fill up time and just accept everything for what it is and whatever way that I can get myself relief until it's time to go, and if you what it felt like to be me before you made this interpretation of a guy that dosen't exist, you wouldn't blame me for that."

"Human nature is messed up, Bojack. It's meant to drag you down and make you sick like a cage," the wife spoke.

"Yeah, I know. You think I don't live in the town of sickness? People come here to try and prove their worth to people that will never let them feel like it's enough. I can attest to that."

"But once you realize that, you can free yourself from it entirely. You can stop believing what they say as hard truth. But you need to have the expanse of allowing yourself to break out of what you've been told over and over again. All things considered, it might be the hardest thing to do, to deconstruct your beliefs about your worthlessness and the world as a whole and way of life alone. That's why you were placed with someone who can offer you something entirely new and free. That can help you see the inherent worth you have, even as the world tries to take it from you." She indicated her eyes over to the pool porch, where you were currently busying yourself pacing around the pool. Bojack's eyes winced as he turned his head over his shoulder as he looked at the looming porch on the steaks. "Don't deny yourself that. It could determine the beginning or the end of everything. You are sick, everything you've believed and have been told to believe has been made by equally sick people who didn't break free. But you can. And so can she."

"Are you planning on having the wedding here or where Eddie's place was?"

The husband's voice hitched up just as Bojack's eyes had been conflicted in thought and layered with his intense emotion. Bojack snapped his head up as he watched the soft edge of his empty eyes of the husband, and this time Bojack didn't feel the need to deny the suggestion the man gave Bojack this time. Instead his disposition began to lower, his eyes pained but now open as he met the insistence of the man's eyes. "I know that it's hard to feel this challenge, and existence may very well just be random and we are wired the way we are for no reason-it would certainly define the indescribable chaos of human life. But my wife and I-we feel the very same joy between both of you that we felt when we found ourselves. Can you confidently and surely say the same thing about denying that existence in good faith?"

Bojack kept silent this time, and rather than responding did his eyes lowering down as ears ears back, his expression empty in reflected exhaust as he turned his empty eyes down, ears lowered and emptiness across his features.

"The rarest thing in the world is to have anyone care about your soul or anything about you, even as it's the only thing that makes you who you are." The man took the thread of his fingers out of his wifes', and his arm came to press around her waist as he pulled her beside him further, the both of them resetting to go back out to the currently foggy blue haze of the road. The woman pressed her hand beside her husband's chest, and there seemed to be a foretelling contentment on her expression; as if she was already aware of what Bojack would decide before he made it, and somehow, he believed her.

" I think that you should, at the very least, allow that woman to call Eddie, to plan a wedding, before you try to detach from her. But you should marry her. She'll take you away from the sickness, just as we have with one another, and just as she will be promised to do with you the same, and we both are almost certain that you will suffer if you don't and will be cursed with the constant heaviness of the detail of your individual life, and we give this advice with severe insistence to ease the rest of your suffering. Marry her. and make sure that you do it with confidence and don't try to question it. Just let it happen. The best things in life simply happen, and the best things in life are elements that don't make sense as much as they have a spiritual kind of intuition that we follow that eventually transcends into physical sense. But first you have to be able to follow the sacred nature of the lack of understanding to get over to anything else otherwise. Spiritual sickness and emotional sickness and physical sickness are all on the same level, if not very little level from one step from one and straight over to the other. The problem is that people tend to worry about the physical sickness while the spiritual sickness becomes so great that it ends up affecting the physical sickness, anyway. You can be better than that, Bojack. You should be. Your sickness is telling you everything."

The husband stepped his way back, his eyes turning to his wife as he talked to her lowly while she spoke a statement in a softly muttered agreement, turning her head down as she kept her way by her husband while they took to stepping beside the road.

"That's strange."

Bojack's eyes abruptly snapped upward as he felt a vague somber conflicted breath leave his lips as he turned his head up to where he heard the trail of your voice. Your head was turned down to meet his eyes as your palms were pressed beside the rail and met the wide eyes of Bojack's eyes as he turned in worried bewilderment, snapping his head back as he watched your palms ease beside the rail of the baloney.

"What?" Bojack stepped his way around entirely as he turned his head up and gazed at you with worried layered emotion in his eyes as he turned his sight up at you. "What are you doing? Go to bed."

"I wanted to listen." Your elbows pressed beside the gray rail of the balcony, his ears flown down as he gave you a hard glare of his expression while walking his way further under the baloney. Though your expression was one of someone who was emotionally drugged and sickly, there was a vague tint of amusement as your elbows rested beside the baloney. "I wasn't ready to leave yet, but you wanted it."

"Yeah. So that you wouldn't have to listen to any of this nonsense. Is that not clear?"

His tone and his gestures gazed up at you definitely, though there was also a little bit of genuine insistence of care to his anger and an attempt of him trying to make sense of the night that was around him.

"I'm sorry." Your voice was threaded into a soft flirtation as your cheek rested beside your palm. "Do you want me to go inside?"

"Yes." His face tensed with emotion, and he closed his eyes as he pressed his hand to his face as he added; "No. Not if you don't want to. I mean-"

"We would love to be invited!" The wife's voice cracked out through the fog and caused a jolt in Bojack's air at hearing it, his eyes closed as he tensed at the wife's insistence. "I'm sure lots of people would be interested in being apart of the celebration. It could be something that would strengthen the both of you going forward. Turn that specific inward hell into something free and fresh!"

Bojack's dry eyes opened as he released his hand from his expression, wincing as he turned his eyes up to where you were resting beside the balcony. You didn't say anything, but there was an agreement to your expression of your soft curiosity as you met Bojack's eyes that spoke that you understood well enough the context of what they were suggesting, and the worst part was that, whether Bojack admitted it or not, he could feel the undeniable humanity in him of that longing pulse of desire of the fact that connection with you was, in fact, the answer, and he was devastated not that he felt it, but that he knew he wasn't ready to accept that truth.

He gave a soft wince of his own wretched and graceful eyes as he eased his fingertips behind his hand and rubbed it, stumbling his stout body forward as his aged face turned up to where you eased your body beside the balcony.

"It's ok." Bojack's voice called out to you as he stopped himself with a soft hitch of his breath while he met your eyes, affected by the emotion within them even from far as he saw the intensity of the red of emotion of your expression. "We're just talking about what to do about Eddie, is all. Go back inside and relax."

"Can I call him?"

Bojack's eyes widened at your question, and he shook his head tensely while he closed his eyes as he gave a soft breath of protest.

"No. That is not a good idea. We'll talk about it when I get up, ok? What's important is that you stay up there and start to get some sleep."

"He seemed excited." The husband spoke with a soft warmth of genuine appreciation that struck into Bojack at the man's statement, and Bojack's eyes turned as he met the man's eyes. He was about to step on the road while he turned his head over his shoulder and met Bojack's conflicted expression. "Maybe the both of you could plan something, make it so you can be married here and have Eddie with the after wedding."

"No." Bojack's eyes widened as his body stood tense and upright. "That's not what's happening here. We're not getting married."

"Can I talk to Eddie sometime tomorrow?" Your tone was gently eased into a soft inquiry that caused Bojack to snap his eyes up tl you as he gave a soft hitch of a breath, his eyes hollowed in hs regret emotion as he turned his head up to meet the question of your eyes. He felt that softness and mercy coming over him the way you had a power to bring out of him as his eyes turned down in guilty thought-he rubbed his hand beside his arm as he gave a soft reset of a breath while he turned his eyes down in conflicted shame.

"Maybe. I don't know. I still don't believe anything that he said is actually true as much as it is the guy is probably having some sort of grief stricken breakdown due to the fact that he's been sitting around and grieving the same person for years and sitting in a place where he's completely disconnected from all society and has nothing to reground him. I would have felt bad for the guy and would have asked him to come back with me to get him a place around here or something where he could be more apart of the world, but-he ended up having a little bit too many issues. More than I knew what to put up with." His dry eyes, confident in his extension of rejection of any genuine faith in Eddie's philosophy, turned to the couple. "Which I know is rich coming from me, but- " A small shrug of his shoulders as he turned his dry eyes down and looked over at you, and he managed a small, grateful raising of his lip as he met the soft extension of your own eyes, your cheeks eased into a red blush, and although he could see the pain and the strain that was within you of whatever kind of illness was constantly following you because of the pollution of your past, at the very least it was clear you were following Bojack as best as your were able emotionally, and offering him at least a little bit of relief and clearly trying to keep yourself within a strained decent attitude for the sake of the both of you on that night, as you had every week previously. He felt a soft calm of appreciation as he took in the simplicity of your essence, and he felt a small raise ease on the curve of his lip as it met his eyes while he met the bittersweetness of your own sweetness. You said nothing, but the worthlessness of how you met his expression in that unspoken narrative was all either of you needed.

"We're glad to help," the husband spoke, his other hand coming to group beside his wife's waist as he pulled her in. She threaded her own beak further beside his shoulder, her eyes glimmering up into a gratitude and she looked in between the both of you still with that compelling confidence of spirit- something that seemed as if it was the rarest thing to come into contact with even more so than money or quality people or of positivity or anything similar. His eyes turned as he met Bojack's own tentative expression, his stout fingertips balled into his hands as Bojack turned his head over his shoulder to meet the man's eyes. "If you have the wedding here, let us know."

"What we really wanted to do is make sure that we could come over here, try to catch up to make sure if you were getting married. That we could try to offer our blessings."

Bojack's eyes turned down, and he only settled for his palm grazing beside his arm as his shoulders slouched.

"I'd like that."

Your voice was at peace; at rhythm with its intention and centerment in a way Bojack had never fully heard from you before, as if to have even the idea of the wedding was something that was healing to you, and Bojack felt a bittersweetness coming over him as he turned his eyes up and watched the ethernal reflection of the white of your dress, timid and small and fragile as you were, beside the rail. There was a profound expanse of pain in your wretchedness, but Bojack could feel that there was something about it that was so soothing within his own torment that he found he couldn't deny or cut you off from the idea of the wedding, much less deny it entirely. The healing of the spirit was too strong for it; he knew that, and he couldn't have even though to deny it.

"Ok." It was a simple word Bojack spoke; somberly spoken, but with enough gentleness to it, mature and accepting, that as he spoke the simple word of permission, his eyes turning up to you as a certain acceptance came easing across his features, there was a small shift and change in the context of the conversation.

Your expression instantly fluttered downward into an odd shyness, the blush glimmering on your cheeks even further as you did so is as you heard the somber and blunt permission of Bojack's words. Bojack's smile raised up further as he met your expression as your turned your eyes down to meet his while a certain peace began to overcome your features as you turned your eyes down to meet Bojack's; and a peace came over you as Bojack gave you a soft ease of his somber gentle eyes, now oddly romantic in his invitation, as he smiled softly and met yours, the emotion in earnest increasing between the both of you as he saw that respectful spiritual peace met your eyes, and for the first time did it almost feel as tangible as any outward stimulant Bojack had ever put any trust in.

"That settles it, then." Bojack's eyes were torn away from yours only from the simple statement of the wife, and Bojack's expression tensed as he turned his head over his shoulder to meet the wife's tone and her odd contentment. She stepped her way to where the road was now entirely fogged over by the blue neon haze, her husband beside her keeping his arm firmly gripped beside her waist as he helped her down the street. She gave a wave of her white hand as she indicated her arm behind her shoulder and gave Bojack a soft dismissive nature of her hand as she waved him off. "Invite us over to the wedding, please! We'd love to hear of it. Be a part of it."

The couple continued to walk down the street, and though Bojack tried to keep his focus on them if only to not be left alone to the door that had been opened for the both of you moving forward if he were to turn and talk to you, they were disappearing far too quickly under the heavy blue haze of the fog, the husband talking to his wife as his tone pierced through the air as she laughed lightly with her voice being encaptured by the thickness of the fog as she stumbled her way beside her husband while he walked her to the street, their voices catching into the fog until it was rendered to nonexistence, their forms turning away into the heavy blue dense dark fog of the night.

He took a deep breath, closing his eyes as he felt the tension overcoming his expression at the idea of facing you again. His ears lowered, and he couldn't bother keeping the pout off of his features, but he turned his eyes back to you, and for all of the hesitance and for the tentative and suffocated emotion on his expression, he turned his gentle eyes up to you, and managed a soft raise of his lip as it met the soft melancholic wince of his eyes as he met yours, easing up into a guide of bittersweetness while your eyes turned to meet Bojack's. Your pale arm was pressed on the front of the balcony, your other hand coming to rest beside your cheek while you met his eyes with a supple raise of your lips, bittersweet and as wretched as the emotion on your expression was.

"I'll come up. Don't worry about anything. Please."

Bojack's raspy voice hung in the empty air as he walked his way over to the hill while he walked around the building. You stayed by the verge of the rail as you watched Bojack walk his way up the hill, and he could feel the tension of his nervousness increasing as he made his way to the front entrance of his house. He closed his eyes as he rolled his shoulders while he looked through the open gray doors that were half open in front of him as he saw the small crack of them reached out, and he raised out a hand as he pressed his fingers against the open door while he stepped his way inside.

He turned the door closed, tentatively turning his head over to where he could see your small frame still leaning beside the balcony, and Bojack's eyes winced as he pressed one hand on the door, the other closing the door shut as he felt his fingertips rest beside his palms as he watched the long length between you and where he was across the living room. His eys flicked down in conflicted thought and he turned as head over to the light switch as he turned down the blaring stagnant yellow light entirely until there was nothing but a welcoming soft dim that was surrounding the living room, the neon light from the pool and the outside city adding into the bittersweet ease of the night and from the city outside.

"Weird combination, am I right?"

Bojack shoved his shoulder beside the door as he pushed it out with a grunt, his eyes tentative and questioning in his uncertain resolve as he shoved his arm beside the sliding doors, and a soft apology eased in his expression as he saw you turn your body away from where you were leaning your elbows beside the rail, blinking lightly as you turned your head to where Bojck made his way outside. He gave you a small raise of his smile as he eased his palms beside the sliding food and shut it. In the wake of him taking in how delicate and wretched and human you were in contrast o the business of the city outside and the constant busy pollution of it, you seemed in contrast like a small thread of fragile humanity; as wretched and as forgotten within the constant changing world as it came, and yet that was all the more reason for his draw to you; for the innate wisdom it seemed to promise for him to focus on that rather than an alternative.

Your head titled as you gazed at Bojack with soft inquiry, that playfulness, which Bojack was now realizing was an extension of hope in your own bittersweet way, as you gazed at him in question. His eyes flicked down as he walked his way across the porch, fingertips encased by his wrist.

"What is?"

"The whole wedding thing and the pushing of it. Especially from two people like that who just come up and out of nowhere. Talking to us like it's dependent on something over something as not a big deal as marriage. Weird." He gave you a nervous raise of his lip as he met your eyes in a tentative hope for you to agree. "Right?"

Your eyes turned down to the side of the balcony, keeping yourself by the edge as your eyes eased out nd out the various buildings that made up the loneliness of Los Angeles. Bojack felt any other words he could have offered you pause in his breath as he watched you, seeing the breeze pick up beside the tattering of the white of your dress, eyes wincing and teeth poking out as ears lowered in his tentative uncertainty.

"I'm trying to find a sort of peace in the inevitability of loneliness, Bojack. I'm trying to see it as something that will promise me eternal peace and strength that if everything was taken from me, there would be nothing to feel bad about or to mourn. That I can prove myself as a isolated person to rely on my inner endurance in such a way that no matter how the world fails me or what is taken from me, I never suffer."

"Yeah?" Bojack walked beside you, his eyes turned across the small inward curling of your small form as you kept the detached sickness in your eyes. "How is that going?"

Something flashed in your eyes, unreliable, and your face etched into a soft pain as you turned your head to the side and over into a soft consideration across the city. Bojack felt his face fall as he watched you, taking in the layer of your human and emotional discomfort, and settled for resting his arms beside the rail as he turned his heavy eyes down, thoughtful in shame as his ears flickedd while he turned his heavily hooded eyes downward, troubled eyes easing out over through the impasse of the clustered city in front of him, lights of life of the city reflecting in his eyes as he took in the bittersweetness of the life of it.

"What do you think about, though?" Bojack dared to turn his eyes in your direction as he gazed at you with tension, hesitancy eased onto his features. Something flicked in your expression in thought, and you blinked slowly, as if to recenter yourself, and turned your eyes to meet the soft inquiry of Bojack's. He felt a slight jolt of anxiety at seeing your eyes blink in their bittersweet confliction as you turned your eyes to Bojack, and he darted his eyes down fearfully, but he allowed himself to push through the fear as he asked; "About the marriage?"

Another glimmer of emotion, intense in its question but hidden into a way Bojack couldn't quite read, eased into your eyes. "About what they suggested?"

"Uh-yeah." Another shrug of his shoulders. His eyes darted up to you tentatively as he continued,"What do you think about it?'

Your eyes flicked down to the rail, soft consideration in your wretched face. He could tell that you were aware that you had to walk tentatively in order for him not to push you too much in the wrong direction, and though he felt a loathing at himself for it, he knew how much he had pushed you to reality was required.

"I meant what I said." You eased further into yourself, Bojack gazing at you with soft inquiry. "About wanting to Although I knew just as well for when I said it the hear of who I was concerning myself with.."

"Good." Bojack's eyes lowered into their hooded exhaust as he turned his eyes back over to the dense city light. "All things considered, I'd say that's for the best."

The city continued on its its loud and quick indifference, speeding past the small roads and trails that from the balcony only seemed as if it was a distant and detached observance of seeing human life and the business of it; melancholic and almost peaceful when only observed, a game Bojack had played plenty of times to sooth himself from the chaos when he was exhausted beyond what he could stand being apart of it for the day. After having to ease himself through a wall of self consciousness and foggy insecurity he turned his head over to you with a regret and reflective pout, and with a quick breath of a reset and saddened eyes he managed out the words he could make himself believe in as much as he was able;m

"Listen, I know that when someone has a hard lot in life, it's almost impossible for them to believe in any positivity and not to be in constant grief over the idea that they could have been born into a better life and knowing the kind of betterment that they could have felt if they had been."

"That's the thing. Even my despair and experiencing life hasn't just been one thing." Your elbows readjusted and leaned back onto the balcony, distance of reflection present in your eyes, depthful and thoughtful as you added; "Not at all."

"No?" Bojack's tone was soft, genuine easing into inquiry as he allowed the soft welcome to enter his voice of curiosity. He kept his arm leaned beside the rail as he turned and looked you over, gently guiding his inquiry to you in the hopes you would feel safe to speak it.

"No." Your tone was bittersweet, reflective in thought as you watched the small trails of light reflect in your eyes. "The complete opposite, though I have had plenty of days of being caged into the emptiness and predictability people would assume from someone in my situation, and I try not to blame myself for that, though I am only human."

Bojack's eyes eased downward as heavy eyelids eased down on his features. The muscles on his face tensed in thought, and after a moment of consideration of what he should say did he feel the words leaving his breath as he spoke, without knowing or intention as to why.

"The neighbors came over mainly because they thought we should get married. As a matter of fact they assumed that we already were. That you were my wife."

Your eyes turned up from where you were considering the chaos under your expression, eyes flicked while easing between Bojck's expression as you met his inquisitive eyes. Though you said nothing, there was some understanding and silence in your eyes as you met Bojack's while his eyes eased into yours in tentative progressing of what he was trying to figure out what he wanted.

"Yeah?"

Bojack's eyes winced as he snapped his eyes away from yours for a moment, losing his bravery.

"Should we call Eddie, do you think?" His voice was gentle in essence as he turned his eyes up to you, and a soft inquiry entered your expression meeting his question. He gave a shrug, as if to attempt causality in the situation, while he turned his eyes down in thought. "I don't exactly know what the guy's problem is with what he;s been doing lately, but if there's anything to go by with what the neighbors said, I don't see any reason why it's not obvious to at least give the poor guy a call." Sounds like he needs it."

"Are you sure?" Your hands glided off of the rail, pale fingertips threading against your psalm as you gazed at Bojack in inquiry. He turned his eyes down, wincing as he gave a small shrug again, hand coming to rub beside his arm as he eyes turned down in his conflicted thought. "You sure you want a woman who won't be in your life for much longer to be apart of something like that?" Your past life?"

Bojack's dry eyes turned up to meet yours., confidence in his empty life, if nothing else, and far more reassured to talk about that than he was the possibility of richness your existence presented to him.

"Eddie is not a past life. He's just a guy I spent some time with, is all. During a-hard time. And I think you both would benefit from talking to someone outside of your..less than fortunate life scenarios." His eyes winced in thought, soft consideration on his features as he added; "And, if you would like, we can see about the whole…you not staying here thing. That dosen't have to be set in stone." He paused lightly for a moment as he rubbed his arms, then added with another tentative comment without turning to meet your eyes; "I'd prefer if it wasn't, actually."

"Where is the phone?" A soft emotion passed over your expressed, centered, focused; pure, and something about it that was so at ease within itself that Bojack almost couldn't stand how simple his rich contentment in you was; as if he had spent his entire life overcomplicating existence with other people that were as aimlesss as he was. Bojack's eyes flicked up into being present as he followed your eyes that turned to the living room.

"I actually don't know. I haven't called the guy in, well, ever. Due to the fact that he is not in my life, as I stated." His eyes looked you over. "Do you still have his card? The guy must be aware that I have no capacity of being able to reach him, if nothing else."

"I kept it by the couch. The big gray one. Placed it by the pillow."

"Oh. Well-ok." Bojack eased his hand away from the rail, wincing as he looked you over, ears lowered. "Let's go inside then. Call the guy, try to clear this mess up, see what we can do from here. You can go to bed anywhere you want tonight, we'll get some sleep, clear up our heads and start tomorrow. Sound ok?"

"Do you want to do this?"

"Do I want to? Of course not. The guy has way too much going on and deals with it in a way I already decided a long time ago was something I did not want to deal with. But-" He gestured to you lightly, earnest emotion in his features as he eased his hands away from the rail. "I did want to make sure you could have everything cleared up. Before you..possibly go, anyway. See that there's no one waiting or expecting you to get married or anything like it, so you don't have to worry about feeling guilty for it."

"I don't feel guilty." A slight laugh left your lip, your eyes eased down in reflective thought. Bojack's expression followed your eyes as you eased your expression downward. "At all. I actually like it more than you know. More than I understand."

"I know you do." Bojack's tone was somber, gentle in his response, soft in his reciprocation as he spoke. Your eyes eased up to Bojack as you met the soft raise of his lip, meeting into the ease of his eyes as he met yours with a gentle, guilt and conflicted expression.

He paused as he turned to the sliding doors, wincing as he turned to you and gestured with one hand for you to follow him over into the entrance.

"You first. You can even pick up and talk to the guy first if you want. I'm sure he'd rather talk to the woman who he thinks saved the guy from his mortality that he remembers as a grumpy ass far more than he would me."

You breathed a small reset softly, crossing your arms in front of your chest as you walked your way around the pool, Bojack's soft concern following you as his hands found the back of his palms while he waited for you to walk ahead of him a few steps. He turned his delicate and emotive eyes over to the compact buildings, turned his eyes down in a pained breath, then began to follow you as he walked around the pool and followed you over to where you eased your hand against the door and walked your way inside to the dim light of the living room.

"Just pull out the car and call the guy." Bojack turned his hand beside the sliding door as it closed as he turned to face you while he walked his way over to where you pulled the pillow back and eased your fingertips beside the card while Bojack watched you with a small tentative guide of his eyes. "If he's actually so convinced of the wedding and of us getting married, the idiot must be thrilled to hear from the wife who caused so much joy."

Your eyes blinked as you turned your eyes down to the back of the pillow and pushed it back, standing yourself upright as you gazed over the card. Eddie's number was written in a modest and shaky writing, old fashioned and utterly human. Your eyes blinked up at Bojack lightly as he stepped his way behind the couch, watching you with a tentative and meditative reflection as you curled yourself by the couch, eyes turning down to the card as your thumb pressed beside the ink; it was so raw, so fresh, that it smudged lightly under your touch.

"Here." Bojack gave a soft grunt as he threaded his hands to the phone in his gray hood as he kneeled down and handed it to you. Your head turned over your shoulder as you watched where he handed the phone, and a small raise of your lip edged up as your hand pressed onto the phone, Bojack offering you another light smile that met his eyes.

You dialed the number, Bojack settling for giving a soft breath as he adjusted behind the couch and watched as your body curled against the couch, your pale legs coming to curl in front of your chest as you leaned your body back, cheek leaning beside the phone.

"Yello?" A causal tone of a voice, humorous and easy going, drawl in a southern accent answered after a few rings. You hesitated for a moment, threading your arms further beside your chest as you readjusted and tried to calm your own nervousness- for some reason, the story of how he had talked with so much joy and confidence to the couple that he had originally invited and called almost made you feel self-conscious about who he thought you were and the kind of value and purpose that he assumed that you carried. When you turned your head over your shoulder to meet Bojack's inquiring eyes, he looked over at you in a soft concern of question as to why you were hesitating.

"I can talk to him if it's too much for you." He reached out his hand for you to place onto his palm, but after another moment of thought you blinked rapidly and said no softly, shaking your head as you readjusted your body back up against the couch while your body kept curled against the corner while you played with the side of some of the white rags that was lying messily in between your pale legs.

"Eddie."

You said it simply, the name simply hanging in the air as you heard Bojack giving a heavy sigh of a breath with his nervousness as he watched you with those tender inquisitive eyes, somber in their worry.

"Who is this?" There was a soft cackle that came from the other side of the phone, and you tensed again, though already you could feel a soft lightness overcoming you now that you were having an actual interaction with the former friend. Taking in of just how casual he seemed, something about his spirit , seemed as if it wasn't as sick and as tormented by the corners of life and of existence such as the way that you were- and certainly the way that Bojack was with thinking that he had to be a certain way in order to be worthy of some sort of imaginary concept of value of life. "This isn't the old fat guy that I know is finally getting his ass on the right trail in life, is it? Because I have a lot to say to him."

"Jesus." Bojack's voice was somber in a slight annoyance, and you raised the phone away from the side of your cheek for a moment as you turned your eyes up to look at the slightly annoyed tension on Bojack's features. He placed both hands on the side of the couch as his annoyance flickered up against his eyes while he looked down in tense thought. He gave a slight shrug as he got his way upward from the couch and began to make his way over and behind the counter, yourself turning as you watched him busy himself along the counter with that heat seizing his eyes as he played with the several different glasses beside the counter that sat in the cabinets, the tension in his features is not leaving his features as he busied himself with the weight of his conflict. "That guy has not stopped with the traits of teasing things that he really has no place to pole at." Bojack closed the cabinet as he kept one glass in his hans, turning dry eyes to you as he indicated his cup up. "Let him know that."

"Well, I certainly hear someone talking on the other side of the phone. Low voice, sounds similar to him, and yet I don't think that he's the one that decided to call me. You're far too pleasant in a silent way for that."

On the other side of the phone where Eddie's joyful and casual tone was talking, already helping to ease up a little bit of weight just from hearing him, did you hear what seems like a rustling of natural trees and of leaves that seemed to be jolsting against one another in agreement through what must have been a soft nighttime breeze. You could hear it just how naturally smoothing and centered in nature wherever Eddie was was, and you found even your own body beginning to relax further beside the couch as you did so, feeling a soft raise of your lips as you tried your best to enjoy the peace of that of what Eddie seemed to have that was an indefinable treasure; perfectly confident within his existence in a way that you hadn't experienced and the longest time you could remember, and something pure about it beyond what you could place.

"So, am I right?" Eddie's voice was raised into a drawled tone of his own excitement as you felt your fingertips squeeze the phone in soft amusement. "Is this really the woman that's able to give at least one more lost assshole so much peace inside of him that it's going to bring so much good into the world, break up a little bit of the black for a little while, give us all something to celebrate rather than being hidden from? Because, let me tell you, it's getting worse in this world, and it's always been terrible before our times. Having even one slice of good as much as the both of you had isn't anything less than a miracle."

"This is the woman that he took in for a little while."

Your hand threaded beside your arm that was holding the phone nervously as you did so as you heard a little bit of silence from the other end for a moment, with nothing but the rustling that came up from the trees surrounding the outdoor peace from Eddie on the other side of the phone. "He's planning on helping me to figure out how to go forward with the rest of my life. He's been giving me shelter for the past couple of weeks. and I'm very grateful."

"Why don't you ask him why he still has that tongue on him when he's literally trying to dig himself into things that first of all, aren't true, and second of all, even if they were true, wouldn't be any of his goddamn business."

"Well, that was certainly the man that I know that I've been concerned with lately" You heard the way that Eddie let out a laugh that was so carefree and confident in its essence that you could physically feel the way that it was raising up into what must have been the fresh air on the nature he was surrounding by with where he was; part of you imagined a simple night, with trees surrounding the lake of the cabin of where you knew he lived from what you had heard now and then from stories Bojack had dropped hints of without meaning to when giving him soft reflections of his past.

You gave up a soft breath of your own amusement as you curled further in yourself with a soft wonderment while you heard Eddie's footsteps walking through what must have bena green pasture; you could imagine him surrounded by nothing but nature, and the energy on the other side was as soothing in its essence as it came, fully grounded within its presence and confident, rather than wretched or conflicted the way you could feel the sickliness in you and Bojack, concerned with outward stimulants and opinions and perceptions of value of people who had nothing to do with you, ot ever would.

"So, tell me, how is it? Because if there is any way that I've been able to figure out the purity all the way from over here and hear the news from it, I can't imagine what it must be to be in the center of it or to even be nearby. Much less to be the entire source of it."

"Tell him the truth, Erika."

Bojack's tone was somber and tired, though there was a soft edge of patience to his tone that made you feel safe, understood, despite Bojack's clear frustration. You opened your mouth to say something, but the words fogged up on your lips; there was something about the freshness of Eddie's energy that was beyond what you knew how to understand, but you certainly knew you didn't have the want or power to interrupt it.

"It must feel like nothing else. I can't imagine that kind of innocence and freedom in the world and to be free from the black lovelessness and the scum of humanity." Another soft and raspy chuckle from Eddie's lips, confident as it came in its origin. "It's like nothing else, even just to hear from it. Truly joyful things are almost nonexistent in these lives and world that are this black and lost-and yet, somehow, the good always ends up cracking out eventually. It must be incredible to get something as wonderful as the two of you have now, almost heartbreaking being that great in what you were given in regards to human life-genuinely great, so great in a way that even the people who have been told by this world that they're great cannot even imagine it." Everything Eddie was speaking was with a continued guide of amusement and humor; everything he spoke in a way of someone who was fully healed in their humanity and centerment, where for most there was sickly torment and insecurity.

"You sound very confident that Bojack and I found it."

"I didn't know. I was told. My wife, if she were here, she could help you come to understand the very thing I came to know, and she would say it a lot better.-She would have had plenty of inside wisdom to say about it, that one. She had a better rhythm with the one species that is wretched inside of itself and fails to follow its own nature more than anybody that I've ever known will ever exist." His voice had an authentic tone of gratitude in the way he spoke, gentle, emotionally mature, and fully at ease. You felt your body easing further beside the couch, feeling oddly seen by Eddie in the soft spiritual tone of his voice of the rarity of someone who had been given genuine humanity in his life to now be content within his existence rather than despairing, and validated in the profound want you had to Bojack and your desire for him.

"That must explain the tongue that he has on him." Bojack had settled for sitting his plush body behind the counter, threading his hands up on a glass that looked like it was nothing but water and vodka at the same time-if there was anything to go by from the smell of it. You turned your emotive eyes over to Bojack as you simply offered him a small raise of your lip. You couldn't deny that to talk to somebody that seemed as if they had a certain kind of indescribable lifting and healing within himself that was so naturally within his spirit that it almost took you away in a way that was resoundingly refreshing.

"I think what the both of us did for each other was that we both recognized that we're in a place where we would have benefited from helping each other, is all. I was in a place where I was suffering, and I need someone to follow that black hole inside of me, and so did he. And I think that we can both agree that life is just about following whatever it is that feels good or true to you, no matter what it might mean long term. or no matter how much the world might dress it up."

"Well, of course." Eddie's tone was more soft and full of emotion now, tender in agreement. "The world is full of nothing but a bunch of broken black to take away every single loss of human joy that you could get, and all the meanwhile they don't even know or care about your journey. Complete ridiculous nonsense, and you'll destroy yourself from the inside out worrying about it."

Eddie's voice was eased into soft consideration as you smiled and turned your eyes down, threading your hands up against the soft romantic dim light that came from the dim living room.

"It's alright. We're all old here." Your cheek leaned beside the phone as you heard Bojack give a bitter grunt. "We've been alive on this earth long enough to know how to cope with any challenge now."

"Well, don't bother telling me that I'm wrong about the news, because I got it far and wide from a couple of people that seemed as if they were so confident, and I don't know how they manage to source it back to the both of you-but I believe them, and I'm in debt to them for telling me. Not because of who they were, but because of how they said it. That light and that life inside them that I haven't seen since being around my wife. That certain kind of spirituality and that goodness that has nothing to do with any value that you carry inside of yourself or what the world tells you that you are worth-that has nothing to do with anything on this earth in general but something so good, so spiritual, that it's beyond anything that we know, and thank god. Hearing about Bojack finally finding a woman that made him settle down made me forgive him for everything that happened in the past or whatever he said to me about cutting me off. Hearing about something that was as pure and as worthwhile as much as what my wife and I shared that was beyond anything!"

His voice trailed up into a spiritual amusement, and you could hear how his voice and the enlightenment in his voice carry out and over into the air as it raised upward into a rhythm of the natural air and himself You gave a soft breath of amusement, feeling his emotive freedom and purity of truth even just from tone of voice, the lightness of his tone and enlightenment as it naturally intertwined with the air around him through what must have made up fresh natural night.

"And let me tell you-even just to do that, even just to hear it, has been like nothing else. I'm internally in gratitude for you for it. In my old age, no less."

Another soft chuckle left his lips, and you turned your head over towards the side as you pulled further against the back of the couch as you realized just from the life in in his voice that he fully meant everything that he spoke and earnest. There was a certain kind of grounding truth to the way that he spoke, a certain kind of essence that was within him that seemed as if it spoke that he knew exactly who he was on a spiritual level that seemed incredibly rare within the aimless and the sick and the depressed; certainly you being one of them, and you knew the empty feeling all too well, and the confidence of enlightenment within him was all the more chillingly human for it.

"I certainly appreciate you saying that. Or at least, I do. I'll take anything that I can get. Anything that resembles a sense of home or if grounding or a form." Your head turned over your shoulder as you tried to meet Bojack's eyes, through he only gazed at you with his dry hooded eyes, unreliable, exhausted and bittersweet for the time being in his hidden melancholy. " I think that was all that it was ever about. anyway."

"Of course. if it was easy for someone to have a sense of home just by working hard at a talent or a hobby or interest the way that the world tells us, then everybody would have their sense of home, and nobody would be lost within that Indescribable spiritual nature that everyone carries inside them no matter who they are or what they achieve. That's what nobody ever tells you, especially in that little sick city that your husband is sitting around in wasting his life around within even though I try to tell him that he shouldn't have. It's not about anything of who you are or what you do or don't do,-nothing will ever change the sickness unless you find that little something that really makes it all come together. And you did that for the man that I thought that it would be the most impossible with, and I'm sure that others share the same sentiment as well, and I fully mean this from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, and congratulations."

"He's helped me to feel calmer, certainly." You kept your voice low and calm, turning your eyes down to keep yourself small, though part of you wanted Bojack to hear, and you kept your tone a few pitches hight for the sake of it. "In this world it's easy to take your contentment with your flaws and to have them twisted by others judgment and become defensive and overtly proud. To lose your peace with yourself. The world throws constant hurtles at you daily, and if you listen to the constant human maliciousness and madness of every day judgment, it'll corrupt you so fast there will be nothing left of you if you let it. The only way to survive is to take it for all of the chaos and human waste of sinful maliciousness for their own hurt of being born as human and to separate yourself and your peace. It's the only way to find hope. It always has been. Being around Bojack and his hospitality has been so helpful to detach me from the majority."

"Jesus. What is that guy going on about?"

Your eyes blinked as you looked up to Bojack, who passed his hands away from where he was leaning on the counter he had been nursing lightly. Though he was clearly trying to keep himself detached and somber in thought, there was no hiding the annoyance that flashed in his eyes and the raise back of his ears as he walked his way around the counter.

"Best way to deal with those people you're describing is to realize they're compensating for the lack of compassion they ever got. Not that they'll ever want you to know that."

Your eyes blinked lightly as you turned your head over your shoulder and watched Bojck's stout body walked over to the back of the couch, though he stayed a few paces behind while his fingertips traced the top of the glass in his fingertips. It was clear he wasn't fully intending on joining you just yet, and he stayed back in somber observation.

"Don't mind me." Bojack's eyes turned down to the glass, somber and reflective as he stared at the glass full of half of the beverage meant to disorient him. "Just giving commentary on the apparent therapy parade going on."

Your eyes turned down as your hands gripped beside your dress, and you could sense how Bojack was trying to manipulate his way into polluting the conversion to reassure you that it would be the best decision for you to drop Eddie and leave.

"Well, that's the way, simple thing. People want to do anything they can to have control over a world no one does. And they don't' find what you do with your husband, or even understand what that means, what the two of you have. But you don't need to worry about it. You don't need to worry about anything concerning the world, matter of fact. It'll all destroy itself and fade and come back again and destroy and fade, and all the while the both of you will focus on the simple and good thing of one another. It's lonely, but being detached from the world is a sign, the only sign, that you're doing the good and human thing. We're the only species that denies our own needs." A small chuckle, one as simple and reassured as much as the outside nature that surrounded him on the other side of the phone. "Lorraine and I came to that conclusion at our young age, and we found peace."

"Yeah?" You heard the slight clink of the ice of Bojack's drink ease beside his drink, and a somber breath leave his lips in his slight tension and confliction.

"We lived in the city. Wanted to make the most of it, but-we came to realize after a time that all we needed or wanted was one another. Turned out that the more time went on, the more sick we felt. Other people-they didn't give us what we were looking for. We helped one another and did one thing, only for the people around us to undo all the work we did and turn it over so we had to constantly start all over. You can imagine how exhausting it was."

"I lived on the verge of where people wanted to do nothing but to destroy me. I know. I was less than nothing. No one had any motivation to even see me as human, much less offer me kindness." Your fingertips threaded beside your dress ruffles in thought as you turned your headspace over in thought about the future, still and waiting and unsurprising in all of its challenges and promises for despair; dull and yet the pain still hallowed. "That's still true, and still my future when Bojack figures out how he wants to help me."

"But you see it for what it is. Just chaos, black mindless chaos that grips the people around it and throws people along with them just because it's this withering pathetic desperate thing destroying anything because humans are inherently miserable in existing. We were never meant to be this aware. And once you believe in the bad,it grows until its the default; same thing with someone who is a narcissist, although its far more rare for someone to feel sick with how comfortably above they are above others. And it takes a wise and self respecting person to see it for the immature and juvenile chaos for what it is and to not let it corrupt you. Most are weak and let it happen. Bojack is a good and a wise man, in his own way. I knew if there was a way he could find the rare someone who, for whatever reason, was finally the companion rather than the enemy, then he would find his way to that small glint of gold he had now and then. Maybe not he'll be bearable to have a conversation with." Eddie gave another low and amused chuckle, and you could still hear how his feet was walking his way past the grass, through what you imagined healthy and slick green grass through the natural breath of the earth where it had room to breath in a camp as pure as what Eddie portrayed just from the way he spoke. "Anyway, you're both well on your way now, I'm sure it won't be long. I've already found my wisdom and my peace, and I know you can, too. Nothing on this earth was ever meant for us, and everything we want is everything on the other side of this stupid plane we were told we should want to conquer!"

A loud and freeing chuckle, almost chillingly free in how maddened he sounded in his detachment from the sickly stagance of that of which surrounded you currently, and you could hear the breeze picking up; even just from how Eddie's voice raised into a carefree laughter, you could sense how carefree and fresh the wind sounded, could imagine the natural soothing call of nature that surrounded it and how chillingly freeing it was in contrast to Eddie's carefree light. "Listen, sweetheart, I can tell you have a good heart, and that is the rarest thing for someone who's had their emotional needs taken. Don't even worrying about your place on this earth, mattering or even death. None of it was ever about this earth. None of it ever will be. We're free, baby."

His voice was soft and compelling now, and you could sense the genuine earnest in his tone that made you pause in respect to hear it. Your eyes turned up to the blank television screen that was staring at you as it sat against the white walls of Bojack's house that were currently dim and gray in contrast to the dim reflection of the turned off light, though there was a soft tint of a mirror reflection of the wall from the neon pool that always made the house seem as if it had some sort of a eternal sense to it to that certainly, in some indescribable way, was in reflection of the sentiment of what Eddie spoke, and you couldn't help but believe it.

"Don't you worry about anything people tell you, honey. Not for one moment. That's how people lose that warm sense my wife gave me. She awakened me. How many people can honestly say that they stayed good and in rhythm with what felt good no matter what? I don't know a soul except for myself, my wife-and now the most unlikely person of all, you and your Bojack."

"Thank you. But he's not-"

"Be carefree. Be confident. The world tells everyone they're worthless. There's no reason or truth to any of it. Humans are sick. Don't let it affect you for even a minute." There was the sound of what seemed like a wooden door being opened, and the sound of Eddie's footsteps guiding into the living room as he stomped his feet onto the carpet, the sound of a detachment of his coat as he hung it on what you imagined to be a small hook. His voice was focused, at ease, and gentle as he spoke; "And now, the wedding."

"As much as I appreciate it, Bojack is right in the sense that we're not planning anything." Your head turned over your shoulder as you met Bojack's stern and troubled eyes, who turned his eyes up as he met yours and only gave you a small and somber nod. "And I would say that if there's anything to go about how Bojack has dressed it up, I wouldn't disagree."

"Right. And that's the sickness that wants you both to follow it more than anything. And I know the both of you will try to, and then you'll regret it. I'd like to skip that part."

"We don't have any plan, there's no wedding." This time you turned your eyes to Bojack fully, keeping your sight fully into his concentration as he met yours, guiding you into what you were meant to say simply by guidance. "He's going to take me somewhere and make sure that I get somewhere, and I can't express enough how much gratitude I have to him doing that- and believe me, I, more than anyone in this city, know what I truly am saying in the full depth of it. Not everybody finds someone that raises out a hand to eventually, and I've certainly lived a very long life knowing in full and resounding detail as to what that actually means."

"Of course you have."

Eddie's lips smacked together in what seemed like a vague amusement as he responded in that soft and compelling tone, and it was clear that he was still just as confident in what he was insisting on as much as he had been when the phone call had initially started. Rather than arguing with him further did your eyes turn over to the side as you continuously nervously played with your rags, desperately wanting to hear to some extent what he was going to speak next, even if you felt nothing but an odd guilt for even allowing the conversation to continue. Any denial you wanted to speak was stopped by the confidence he spoke to you that had a resounding confidence that promised it wouldn't be discouraged anytime soon.

"I wouldn't expect anything any different, for two people that are only just starting to discover what it even means to really find that depth that I always knew that you both had the potential to have; of course he always denied it to himself. Though I can't really blame him at this point in my life, feeling the sickness for as long as I have myself, and if anything I think I share in his brokenness-we certainly did when we first met. But he had that hollowing longing for more as much as I did. At the end of the day, the only way to save yourself is to share in the feeling, both the devastation, the humiliation, in order to find someone that sees you and agrees-may take some more than most, but it will always, always pay off. The less I had, the more I found my wife again, when I thought I needed videos and tangible natures to find her. rather than straining it and going forward. Sounds like your Bojack found that rock bottom himself. I'm glad that he's finally starting to learn that lesson." Another soft and amused chuckle from the other side of the phone.

"Good thing, too. The hardest thing is to stay faithful and wise, and in its place is overcomplicated. My wife was the one who made me see that the one thing that actually had definitive worth was the one thing that people told me was worthless; which was my own bare body and essence. We don't need anything. Your husband doesn't' need anything-not even one another, but it will certainly make it better and easier to find what the both of you share with one another whether you know it or not. The more I found my wife and the truth of the sickness of the world, the less I could stand it." You heard a quick movement of his body easing down onto the couch, and your eyes were still kept on Bojack as you met his tender but cautious eyes, and his expression, for the time being, gave away very little.

"As a matter of fact, why don't the both of you come over here for a long while after your wedding, feel what my wife and I experienced that is so tangible and so rare that I know anyone who experienced it themselves would be able to reach me just from knowing it themselves? We're one of a kind now, your husband and I. Granted, I always knew it to some extent when I first found him-but now it's undeniable!"

"No."

Bojack's eyes lowered into a sudden abrupt defiance as he began to walk his way over to where you sat with the phone, and you turned your eyes up as you watched Bojack while he walked his way to where you were curled in yourself.

"Did you hear?"

"Did I hear the guy who speaks from the top of his lungs with delusional thoughts of celebration?" Bojack kneeled his way down beside the couch as he leaned one arm on the back of the couch, indicating his head to the phone that was still pressed beside your cheek.

You hesitated, but you could see the abrupt insistence in Bojack's eyes, and you knew he meant it.

"He was just trying to help. Make it fun."

"Make what fun? Lying about the future and getting your hopes up? Come on."

He indicated his hands to the phone, and though you looked at him with a loose end of guilt, after a moment you nodded lightly as you took the phone away from your cheek and placed it in Bojack's palm. His eyes lowered as he pressed it beside his cheek, leaning his elbow beside the back of the couch as he leaned back. He had spoken the request somberly enough that it ha caused you a sense of respect in his calm execution, despite the fact that you had clearly been able to see the discomfort his eyes and the panic as to what the future would hold.

"Eddie." Bojack eased his body back behind the couch. "How the hell are you doing out there, buddy?"

You found your cheek resting beside the back of the couch as your hand rested beside the back of it, your eyes easing in inquiry as your felt your full exhaustion coming over you now that the weight of the conversation came come to a brief end.

"Bojack." Another chuckle from Eddie; you could hear now how loud the conversation had been. "You sound as conflicted and respectfully wise as I thought you would be."

"She is actually, just leaving." Bojack's eyelids were lowered in a soft exasperation as he eased his body backward, and it was clear he wanted that exasperation to take control again. "Not in this sense that I'm kicking her out-" he added, practically tripping over his words in an odd defense that caused your eyes to turn up and meet his expression of what seemed like a defense of your wellbeing. "I'm getting her a place, making sure that I can get her settled down somewhere where she can obviously feel comfortable or she dosen't feel like she was just kicked on the side of the road. That's the majority of what I'm making sure that I can help her with. Most help she's ever gotten in her life. And while your narrative is…cute, it is completely unnecessary for all of us."

He turned his eyes over to meet yours and managed a slight, small smile to keep it casual between the both of you, despite the layer of the emotional spirituality between the both of you that spoke of something far more than just technicalities of going forward to make you comfortable like Bojack wanted to believe. You kept your eyes on Bojack as he gave you a small, apologetic and tentative smile that reached his eyes up with a vague glimmered softness that spoke of more faith than the blunt nature of his words spoke.

"I'm glad that you're allowing yourself a little bit of elbow room for honesty. You're doing it with far more insight than I would have thought for your first few steps. It takes a little while to go from the place where you've been riding for the amount of time that you have had and to finally allow yourself to see just how wrong everyone and everything is and just how much they want you to be wrong."

"Yeah, eddie, I understand what you're trying to do here." Bojack's expression took on an almost pathetic tentative bewildered uncertainty, though you found it endearing as his face twisted into overwhelming complication. "You're really-selling it on the whole spiritual thing. Especially with the part where you won't just drop it." Bojack's eyes lifted upward in thought. "But I kind of need to do a couple of things for this woman to make sure that this doesn't end up being just another disaster that happens in a long string that has been her life that neither you and I can imagine, so if you could allow me to do one thing here without trying to overcomplicate it, that would be extensively appreciated."

His eyes were low into that charismatic and dry way, oddly pathetic in his emotional disregard towards Eddie;s emotion and in his lack of belief towards it, and the lack of apology of his rude disregard. His ears were lowered while his hands waved in a circular gesture to showcase his own charismatic exhaustion with Eddie's insistence. You took to turning your own eyes to your hands as both of your palms eased up against the fabric spread across your lap, turning your eyes down into a soft exhaust as you did so while you try to detach yourself from his rejection as much as you were able to. At the very least, he was being casual about it.

"You came at the right time. This entire dance came at the right time, and I've been waiting for a little bit now once I came to my own understanding. I assume you must be finally getting to a point where you're not completely hating every detail that surrounds you. To not have everything feel like it's a reflection of everything that you hate about your life and your decisions that you made that made you detest everything around you. It's hard to live everyday being that sick, and even more to realize that it's a reflection of someone that you decided to be and that change is coming."

"Do you know how many times I've been told with that back handed wisdom that I'm ignorant and should be 'grateful' for the unknown things around me?"

"I can't speak for your other experience. But hear me loud and clear. You were already begging to before you even knew it."

Bojack lifted up one finger in a gesture as his eyes lowered in a jaded exhaust.

"I think you've been putting both this poor woman and myself through this conversation long enough. I understand that you've been going through a hard time, even before I came a long time ago, and I'm sorry for that."

"No, Bojack. You're like a wound of something that wouldn't stop leaving me alone with how bad the memory felt of the things you brought up. But if I learned anything from the wisdom of my wife, it's that the only way to make peace with yourself is to go to the wound. Working out incredibly well, in this case."

"Ok. Very wonderful. But I was moreso asking you to stay in reality with my wi-with this woman and I. Unless you'd like me to hang out and forget that you went through this delusional infused bender, in which case I am ok with that"

His eyes winced tentatively into a boyish uncertain timid uncertainty as he spoke the words, clearly trying to not trip over his words as much as he was able to reveal anything inside of him that would have made revealed something inside himself that would have made him uncomfortable-but your body had tensed, straightened, and then released into soft inquiry at the interrupted term Bojack had spoken before he had cut himself off. His ears lowered further, the full sleep deprived puffiness in his eyes coming over his tentative emotional eyes as he turned his sight down in frantic thought, hand coming to rub the back of his neck in uncertainty.

"Look, I get, at least to some extent, what you're going through right now. Is this some sort of episode that you're having in regards to dementia, or something similar?" He lifted up a fingertip in a slight dry exasperation as he turned his eyes up into a slight jaded charm. "And adding onto that, since the answer is clearly a yes, is dementia as carefree and as releasing as much as it looks like, like you're a kid again, or is it as painful as much as everybody who cares about death is always talking about?"

"Bojack, I want you to know that I'm honored to be at this point. The literal climax of something that's as spiritual and as great as much as it can be with what the both of you have experienced so far in your lives, and the release of hope that richness and faith you're about to have."

"Eddie, buddy, that's not-"

"Just to hear about it from afar would have been a gift-especially before everybody else starts to turn to the two of you like little vultures once they start to realize that something is this valuable, although most valuable things is never even seen by the rot of people in the first place because they're too busy looking at the wrong areas and destroying themselves with their wrongdoings and don't see how sick they make themselves or anyone else."

"I agree. And the will never stop. But that dosen't mean you should take my wife-I'm sorry, my visitor and tell her false lies. It's not going to happen, any of it."

"Let tell you, this is unlike anything-like nothing else, to be at the climax of where the both of you are going to be at a bond this wonderful!" Another mad and rich cackle from Eddie. "Amazing! One more person, two people, fully free. It's so much easier to detach from sickness when you do it with your one. I wasn't planning on sticking around much longer-but in the regards of something like this, I could never not stick around. It's like the beauty with Lorraine all over again. Wouldn't trade the celebration for anything on this earth."

Bojack's expression tentatively scrunched into a hesitant exhaust as he heard Eddie let out a another low and soft appreciative cackle-not only confident and in full faith of what he was saying, but in such joy that you almost couldn't help but feel as if you believed it yourself-and where there was sickness and complacency and nothing but self-doubt previously inside of whatever you were made of did you begin to feel a certain kind weight begin to fall away at his words. Bojack's eyes turned as he looked you over with his expression tired and tense, and you only gave him a small raise of your lips and a small shrug as you allowed yourself to meet his own and dim eyes.

"Do you want me to call someone?"

Bojack's eyes were heavily hooded again with his own emotional exhaust as he kept his ears lowered, although he was really more so exhausted now, almost pitable towards Eddie's excitement, more than he was of anything that was annoyed now. You could tell that he was genuine in the fact that he was believing that Eddie was sick rather than following his faith that his tone claimed; even as you know that he felt it with you whether he admitted it or not in a way that suppressed any kind of logic; but whether Bojack expressed it or not, you simply felt it from him.

"I can call a couple of services to come over there, try to talk you through this-uh, episode or whatever kind of term that you'd want to describe that might help you out a little bit. Might help you feel a little bit… I don't know. I know it's probably hard to be reaching the end of your life and to feel like you've been missing your wife all this time, and I can't imagine the kind of isolation that you went through and have been going through over there. I couldn't even last a year."

"How about a ring, Bojack? Do you have a ring that you could give her right now? kKeel down beside her, feel all that way that all that slavery in your own self begins to away and just focus on the complete heaven that you've given one another. I know it's hard to start to believe in, and I'll give you a little bit of grace with that because even I had to go through a little bit transaction of realizing how sick I was from surrounding myself with people who aren't as lucky as Lorraine and I was- but I think that you need to start now, now waste a single moment of your time. You don't need to despair on the lack of time because of your age and the fact that you didn't find her until now. The amount of richness that you'll find will be so life-changing and detailed that it will sweep through everything else and not only redeem it, but make you realize that it was all leading over to the same goal, anyway. How about ring, Bojack?"

"No, Eddie, I'm not going to get her a ring."

This time Bojack's eyes did have a little bit of flare of heated annoyance tha poked through the puffiness of his bags and of his own annoyance as his ears flew back. His other hand curled as it rested beside his hips to carry his annoyance, his arm grazing beside the couch as his stout body tensed.

You took it on yourself to reach out a pale hand and tentatively, on instinct, to thread it against his tense palm to calm him-but your fingertips curled into your palm when you thought about it otherwise, and simply settled for turning your eyes down as a slight pain overcame your features.

"Eddie, do you want me to call somebody? I can call the police. I can get them to show up and try to take you somewhere to lock you up and get you help-and I'm almost willing to even pay for your hospital bills until whatever it is that fell inside of your brain that could distinguish logic from just being a little bit delusional and annoying to complete full blown episode could help you out a little bit." Bojack's voice was becoming more pathetic and eased into a intimated clumsy boyish emotion as he added; "How does that sound?"

"I know that it's hard to accept right now. It's not easy when you've been living in a cage your entire life, which has been made from the entire world but ultimately came from your own making eventually because you couldn't see outside the poison that you were give. That everybody is around you gives you every single day. Faith as an individual when we other people who are nothing but poisoned is the hardest thing, but you're not doing it alone anymore, are you?"

"Eddie-buddy. Please." The muscles on Bojack's face tremored as he close his eyes and turn his head downward, ears flown back as he pressed his hands with a force of frustration up against his snout as his dry eyes closed as he pressed his palm firmly down beside his snout. After a moment did it detach as his own heavily hooded turned over to where you were watching him with a tentative and soft inquiry, and he gave you a small reassurance of a small despite his exasperation that was made heavier from the sickness he already carried inside of him, always turning and evolving in a tormented life full of a species meant to destroy him-and it had.

As your eyes turn up as you met his, he saw just how helpless you looked yourself in the lifeline of your own sickness, curled up on the couch with the rags curled around your torso and legs, naturally apologetic and even helpless as the red edge of your eyes that were always deprived from genuine sleep and even more so of peace looked up at him, giving him permission to do as he'd like, even as it was clear you wanted the narrative Eddie sold; or at least the action upon what he was suggesting.

"It dosen't have to be much, now. Maybe even something left over from an old girlfriend."

The disdain on Bojack's expression increased. "No, that's not-"

"No, you're right. Something like this deserves far more. And the people who came to talk to me, delivered the message of the news they became aware of, when they spread it to me they allowed me to know full and clear that they were aware you had all the material you needed. It was what made it special-the entire thing and the news they spread. You don't need to worry or push yourself too hard trying to figure out where to go or how to go about it. Nature will take its course, and I know nature and our emotions don't' agree, but there's nothing to be afraid of long term; nothing is harming you. It's just things taking as they are. And the same thing of your marriage with your wife."

"Eddie, she's not my wife." Bojack's voice was still full of a sense of rejection, though the more he spoke, the more his voice seemed as if it was becoming somber, at ease. There was a sense of tired exhaustion to his tone, and along with his exhaustion, a strange sense of acceptance. His eyes flicked in thought as he heard the soft and content mumbles of Eddie from the other side of the phone; it was clear from his movement across what sounded like a humble and dusty space, the creaking of the floor, the soft creaks of the wells that he was in the living room, the same musty and reminiscent one that Bojack had walked in his one desperate time where there had been a reminiscent call of past pain beyond comprehension; and yet, even with every reason to despair, peace, and Eddie's natural human nature, had slowly taken its place. He found himself tense as he began to take an inward resolve for the same peace for himself, without reliance of anyone or any outward leverage, as if he were preparing for some profound grief himself if he didn't take a careful concentration of focus of balance through what he was being presented. "Do you mind if I hang up? The woman and I have a lot we need to plan out."

"Sure you do. More than you could ever understand or recognize. Bojack, you're at a time of spirituality right now where you feel low, cheap, impossible to meet the standard of the rest of life around you of what you've seen. But every aspect of life starts that way. It's not any different than starting at the new bottom, taking in the way others do it, and learning an growing until you're the same level. All aspects of life are related to that, big and small. And it's your turn to find the spirituality of what you can share with that woman. You're both close to peace-or at least, the peace you need for one another. It can be that easy, existence, but you both need to find it together. You understand?"

Bojack opened his mouth to insist on something else-but there was an odd heavy exhaustion that overcame him instead, and he tilted his head downward in exhaust, his eyes hooded as he turned his eyes to the side in his exhaustive thought. As your eyes turn up as you met his, he saw just how helpless you looked yourself in the lifeline of your own sickness; curled up on the couch with the rags curled around your torso and legs, naturally apologetic and even helpless as the red edge of your eyes that were always deprived from genuine sleep and even more so of peace looked up at him, giving him permission to do as he'd like, even as it was clear you wanted the narrative Eddie sold; or at least the action upon what he was suggesting.

It was clear that Bojack was exhausted and in the want to to go with his stagnant narrative, but after a moment of tension passed, he only gave a soft breath as his shoulders turned downward as he readjusted his cheek beside the phone, his other hand coming to grip worriedly beside his elbow as he did so as a look of resign came across his features.

"Listen, Eddie, I'll call someone, and-you can even come over here to the house for a little bit. Stay as long as you would like, if that's what you need to stop making comments about-" He waved his hand into a circle as he thought. "-Unprompted proposals to something that you don't understand even after being explained to it in detail by both parties multiple times."

"I don't need to come over there, Bojack. You may have been enlightened, but that head is just as dense as much as it's ever been. I don't need to be sick. I've already been sick. I got out. Where the hell are you? You've been given a chance to have what every corner and section of life is about, Bojack, and anyone who can't see it is either young or in denial or ignorant, and they're suffering for it. Like you."

"Hey."

"Like me! But hey, listen-your wife came from the wisdom of something unknown and incomprehensible to either of us. And thank goodness from everything above. There's something about existence where we deny and reject so many experience and aspects of it to the point where we make ourselves sick-when the entire point thai whole time was to accept every single aspect of our minds and life and existence, loss and gain, isolation and community. It's all the joyful part of something huge of where we came from beyond our understanding, and it's our job to see every aspect of life for the joy that it is. Your wife is one of the countless gifts of promise coming from that. Ethereal. The life's lessons in a human body. You understand me?"

"Eddie-I don't care about what is or isn't right. I have a lot I have to deal with-things that I know are true rather than just your starry philosophical theory-and I need to give energy to it without all this babble. You understand?"

"I understand. I understand how sick you are. When are you going to stop pretending and stealing yourself from your freedom, BJ?"

"I'm not denying myself anything. That would be suggesting that there was something to have." Bojack's voice was unapologetically pointed and edged now, just as the heat of his eyes was. His voice became only vaguely more somber, though it was more potable than it was gentle, as he spoke, "You might be too delirious with grief, even now, for you to understand that."

Bojack spoke it confidently in his jaded rejection-that blunt and angered way that he took on so easily that was clearly a habit of defense. Even from just hearing Eddie's carefree voice, so healed and carefree and almost serving as naive as a child, you could see in contrast at just how suffocated Bojack's was in his polluted and jaded rejection. You could hear the celebration and contrast in Eddie's voice that seemed refreshing just to take in, centered and with a spiritual wisdom that was at the core of every struggle that you knew from your innate sentiment of being human. Though you knew not to say it out loud in the intense energy of the situation, you could sense how everything Bojack did came from a sense sickness that the both of you possessed equally that you knew surpassed understanding, but was fully felt. Your head raised up as Bojack's troubled eyes turned to yours, hard contact in his eyes as he looked at met your eyes and only managed a slight and quick raise of round shoulders on instinct, his other hand gripping more intensely beside his elbow.

'BJ, even if you were right and even if I was just a sick, sad old man-at least I'd know what I was grieving. Have you ever known what you were grieving over your entire life?"

"Okay." Bojack's hand raised upward in exasperation. "So you don't need anything. And we've made it clear that we don't need anything from you, much less your interpretation of what you think is going on so, I'm not sure what we're doing here. Once again, and I asked this politely a last time, you mind if I hang up?"

"Don't you start closing doors right when you know that you're right on the verge of it. What do you have to lose? By following the one thing that I know that you must feel at this point, and I don't know why you're making a pain in the ass for me to observe it and to have heard about it for people that came all the way over to my campsite just to tell me."

"Need to? What do you mean people who came all the way over just to tell you? About something that isn't real?"

Bojack turned his body abruptly to face the sliding doors, and the excess of his impatient energy was taking the majority of his air now. Bojack placed his hand up against his hip as he turned his eyes over to where the doors stood, one still halfway open from where you had come in, walking his way to them with dull and dry eyes. "Because I will tell you that that is just long-term and worthless Los Angeles gossip from a bunch of bored people who were never good enough to have a careers and now they have to busy themselves with people that do-and even worse, make it their personal business. If you really wanted to stay inside of your little healed space that you have over there in that quiet campsite then that would be the last thing that you would be indulging in. Or was that something you and Lorraine forget to heal from?"

"Not people from your polluted little city, bumble brain. They came all the way over here from some place that I didn't know anything about-but I didn't need to, because I felt it the second I saw them walking over through the small little neon fog, over against the horizon a little bit over from where the camping houses that all of everyone around here around the lake lives in as they walked away from it and over through it and the field. I saw with my own eyes, and at first I thought that I had drank or eaten something for the frist time in years that would have made me sick like the way that all of you are doing over there all the time that you call a 'good thing' and I knew I needed to head to bed early. But-when I saw them walking forward, I couldn't deny that it was as tangible and as real as much as the couch I was sleeping that night and the door I had opened when I heard the rustling of their bodies walking through the field-their energy and vision as real as much as the video of my wife and as much as a picture I sleep on within her every night. if not even more so, because I could feel that energy that they had that was the same energy that Lorraine had introduced me to from the start-and I know that if I hadn't been loved by her that I wouldn't have been able to recognize it, but it was the same thing, and I know it was as tangible as much as she was."

"Fog?" Bojack turned his eyes over to you on instinct, even though it was clear that he was making it his intention to walk his way out of the door. Your elbow was leaning against the side of the couch as you turned your head and saw that his hand hesitated beside the sliding doors in front of him, his eyes darting over towards you as ears were lowered back as his eyes turned and met up against the concern of yours. "You said it was blue fog, was that it?"

"Now it looks like we're making a connection. I knew it was more than likely that they had probably tried to visit yourself and your wife before you would reach me. One of the reasons why I chose them as one of the targets of sending out all those letters that I'm sure that they also weren't shy to tell you about. They did send you a letter, didn't they?"

"Yeah, they did." Bojack's voice was more accepting and reflective more so than it was of somebody that was in denial as his hand paused from opening the sliding the door open, which was clearly being done with the intention to separate you from the conversation. It was clear that he wanted you to be a part of it now, and he was hesitating with the idea that he could sense that your eyes were turning as you watched him with your own intense curiosity as his fingertips came to guide up against his palm while his eyes turned into a detached distance as he looked over against the pool that was beside him,- though it was clear that there was a certain kind of distance within his eyes as the soft blue reflection from the outside traced beside his snout. "You said that they just showed up across the field and decided to start telling you about myself and some woman that I probably hadn't even met yet?"

"IT doesn't do well to try to find a logic in the surreal and the things that are far beyond the logic of what we know on a day today basis. Trust me, that's the entire point. That's probably the easiest thing for you to learn if you just learn how to let go of this idea that its a strength to understand everything. The best and the strongest things in life are the things that we don't understand."

"You're full of contradictions tonight. I hope you realize that." This time Bojack did reach out his fingertips towards the sliding door as he gradually began to open it, easing his hands up against the side of it as he began to walk his way outward and over to the porch. Your eyes turned back to your lap and away from Bojack as you blinked lightly as you tried your best to ease yourself into the appropriate wordless request that Bojack was giving for you not to concern yourself with the conversation anymore for the sake of trying to be able to appease to the narrative that this conversation was not a big deal; just some babbling man who had long since lost his perception of reality and was now trying to make a project out of it. Your eyes slicked downward as your eyes flickered over against the soft pale of your hand while you threaded your fingertips up against your palms, trying to busy yourself as you felt the wretched Rrgs easing up against your hand while you tried to find your own grounding piece; a constant journey and a fight that was far from ever won.

Bojack shut the door behind him, stepping back as shut it lightly as he raised up one hand and pressed it up against one side of his ear so that he could better hear the other side of the conversation of where Eddie was speaking. He walked his way across the pool until he made his way over towards the edge of the rail as he leaned his elbow against it, leaning his body down against the metal as he looked over against the compact buildings that met his eyes. His eyes winced as he pouted while he looked over the compact buildings, only just now beginning to realize how exhausted that he truly was and recognizing the burning in his eyes in the same way that he saw the troubled red in yours, and that longing came up with a full force again more than he knew what to do with.

"You know what, forget the ring." Eddie's voice was the only thing to continuously give Bojack energy. "It's a miracle that I'm even having a talk about you like this right when everything is about intertwine, whether either of you realize it or not. And that's the funny and the amazing thing; is that the both of you are in the middle of the climax, and you don't even know it, although I guess lack of self-awareness is good for anybody who's at the center of anything to keep them from being too self aware and drained energy of being present of where the very thing is happening."

"You actually believe everything that you're saying, don't you?" Bojack's hand leaned beside the rail to the point where he could see to the far left and right side on either end. He leaned his body forward to the left side of the Beverly Hills where the couple had come from, squinting to ensure he could see as much as he was able through the dark of the neighborhood. For once in his life almost grateful for the constant light pollution that came from the stagnant lights that was grounded into the green front pastures of the neighbors'houses as he leaned his elbows forward and looked over at the road in front of him, illuminated only by those small still lights that were burrowed fully in the grass of the front yards as he watched the way they illuminated the road. He pressed his hand not occupied with holding the phone to his forehead as he turned his eyes over to the hills of the street, attempting to look for any signs of the car of the figures of the couple that had only been there a half hour before. The more that Eddie described the imagery of what he had experienced, the more that he felt the way that his heart pounded in contrast to what he had just experienced and had seen with you. E

He titled his head even further across the large height of his balcony as he tried to pinpoint where the couple had come from, so much to the point that the curve of his stomach eased beside the glass of the balcony; although already they had disappeared beyond any sign that they had ever been there at all in the first place. Along with that, the dense thick blue of the fog that had been surrounding the space now seemed as if it had dissipated entirely beyond any kind of recall or proof itself. Bojack gave a slight troubled hitch of a rasped breath as he eased his body back behind the rail, easing his tension downward again as he gave a soft rasped hitch of his breath while his hand kept gripped firmly in front of the rail, eyes empty and reflected as he turned his eyes over to the compact reality of the buildings in front of him, eyes dilated into an empty distance while he felt a deep detachment within himself at the usual corrupt and quick business of the buildings.

"The greatest form of celebration is to realize that there's nothing to escape within yourself or anything to be ashamed of, but to simply accept and embrace yourself fully as you are at every experience at all hours and to be fully within yourself and your experience and to enjoy it and to love it. Existence is simple- as is company within yourself."

"You do sound confident, Eddie. I'm glad." His voice was genuine and kind now, and Eddie gave a soft hum of his own emotionally still contentment.

"And you sound like you're at a place where you can begin to find some peace."

"I don't know if I would take it that far." Bojack's eyes turned down to the rail as his hands gripped beside it in his troubled action, troubled eyes turning down as his hand threaded beside it.

"Listen, Bojack, I know that our human brains aren't nearly wired to try to see reality is as anything other than this horrible, empty, detrimental thing that's constantly full of danger and terrible nature, but-once you look away from just how much human nature tries to corrupt everything-and we all know how full of bullshit human nature is and that it's maliciousness isn't even justified as much as it is just this flawed, empty evil thing that only exists inside of us and that we only suffer because we're the same- you really see just how beautiful and just how easy and just how natural even grief and loss is- how the natural process in this world isn't really trying to hurt us. Nothing is, nothing outside of that inherently corrupted and impossibly flawed human nature that no one understands themselves-and that we don't have to take seriously, much less to be affected by it, and even less to destroy ourselves with it. It's just the stupid evil thing that we care around in this lost and tragic species exclusive only to us, and by no means do we have to worry about it ever truly affecting us, because we can see right past it and see the beautiful, natural world that's never wanted to hurt anything or that was even capable of it, and that's the part about existence that we're meant to take seriously. That's certainly what my marriage and the purity of what I had with Lorraine is; is that beauty of that natural existence that doesn't want to hurt us and just wants to take care of us, smooth and at ease, until the day that we die. That's what we're meant to focus on. That's what's real, Bojack. People come and people go constantly no matter how they perceive things or even no matter how much we tell them that they're powerful. It doesn't matter. None of it is real, none of it's been real, nothing inside this us is real and we can't stand that, and our entire species is tormented-but it doesn't exist outside of ourselves. And thank God. it doesn't exist outside of you, and that's a good thing that you can remember, no matter how deep or how terrible that nature tries to corrupt you sometimes. I know that I have my fair share of torment and poison, but I haven't felt that way ever since I saw the truth."

"The truth being-?"

"The truth being that we don't have to take ourselves seriously. That there was never anything about our evil or narcissistic, competitive and superficial way that we torment ourselves with that was ever real that we needed to believe what our own kind tried to make us believe about ourselves. We don't have to believe how worthless the world told us we are. We don't even need to believe our own narrative of sickness of whatever our nature comes up with. It's just own own sickness ina beautiful reality outside of our own little small perception, but it doesn't exist outside of yourself, outside of anyone you ever meet, and we need to always remember that."

Bojack's tired eyes eased down to the road that eas under his balcony of the Beverly Hills road that lead through the mansions. The fog was gone beyond recall now, and he felt that maddening curiosity that could have been taken as faith beginning to dull.

"I think I've tried various ways of telling myself that, although it always came in the form of alcohol." Bojack's eyes flicked to the right side of the road now, his eyes turning over the right corner as he tired to see past the black of the night; but the mansions that surrounded the neighborhood were as quiet as ever as they complemented the black road, nothing but the yellow light beaming in from the windows to signify life. Bojack could feel his expression becoming heavier and puffy as his ears flicked back as he felt the way that his fingertips were slowly gripped beside the balcony just to have something to ground himself as he felt an increased sense of disorientation of the fact that for the moment, there was no sign that the couple had been there-though the confidence in Eddie's voice from the way he had described the visit was enough to pip Bojack's faith up more than he knew how to do with.

'Well, I did receive the letter tonight. Although any sign of it being something that is as 'real' as much as your wife's photograph is starting to become as nonexistent as my want to encourage the belief of it."

Eddie gave another soft and raspy chuckle while Bojack gave a soft breath of a rasp reset, turning his tender eyes over to the overpass of the buildings again until his eyes met the skyline of Los Angeles, oddly grandiose and almost godlike with the preposition the height of Bojack's baloney gave him; the sky was a full black overpass, with a small fog thrill of light that was almost a dark navy blue that cut a few inches over the last of the tallest buildings of the city, the blue light coming into what seemed like a foggy small hole that was sat dense in the middle of the night sky, thick and black without interruptions of stars' light. It was ominous to be on a balcony and height high enough for Bojack to sense the surreality of nature verses the corruption of man under it, though he felt it especially now.

Eddie gave another soft laugh, and Bojack genuinely feel the purity and the essence of-even more notably, he couldn't bother to deny the way that he wanted to feel that carefree freedom within himself; that he wanted to feel as free and as healed within self as much as Eddie was presenting himself as.

"I've been living with my wife's wisdom for as long as I can remember now. For a long time now-waking up every day and just concerning myself with project after project, not in a cynical kind of way like your city people do where you all do it just to fill up what you perceive as empty space. Noting is empty space when you have faith, and the joy and light in faith is like noting else; the energy of it. Everything everyone says sout everything is true, because we're all going to the same core at the end of the day. I've been buying myself with project after project, wood after wood, nail and nail, working on my house with my former wife even as she's here with me loud and clear in the ways that matter-and I've had joy in every quiet project that the people of your city would throw up their entire goddamn eyes at."

"And you feel-confident about this process?" Bojack;s voice was somber with genuine inquiry, his brow raised as his eyes turned to the side in thought.

"Confidence is the kind of term you sick and sad city people use. What I feel is far more rich, far more pure and forgiving than that. For decades now I've felt like a child; inherently worthy of existence, and equal to everyone no matter what. Nothing but good narratives where other people rob and rob themselves and others from it to make them more sick. I've found my peace, and I work on my day to day projects-not in a painful and cynical way, but with ever single moment in every present day is just as equal as much as anything else that has ever been made or existed or anything that anyone could do so-including that little sickly town that you and your other Hollywood executries sit on with your overly serious playground every every single day of your life."

"I think the money would differ-but I'll let you have your personal philosophy, if that's what makes sense to you."

"I get it, Bojack, you're sick. I can't use the suffering against themselves-you're all struggling enough as it is. And it's not your fault, really. It's not really anyone's; no one means to do what we've done to ourselves. It would go against our very nature to on purpose. I've been concerning myself with small projects and tasks every day, remembering as much as I could through the grief and the sickness of that at first that they were me reaching her purity-and it did take me a long time to find the clear headedness and maturity to fully feel my clear headedness again. But I feel equal to you-equal to the neighbors that sit in their rich Hollywood homes and careers, as much for them with their large projects as much as I do my small little wooden projects, and I feel confident and good about it, too, as I do with every positive reflection and reaction that other people would rather fill with poison and sickness."

"Is that belief about being equal how you managed to convince their several mail sorters to give them your letter?"

"I think faith plays a huge part in anything. I just sent it out, shortly after the visit from the people that came from the blue fog-and they received. They received in full, BJ! Energies are on our side more than I would have thought. I'll never be tormented by this species again. I'm realizing that there's not a single thing that I do in mind or body that isn't any worse off than anything anyone has ever done, no matter how quiet or simple it is. Any kind of levitation and maliciousness or sense of superiority or any kind of anything that anyone ever says that's anything less than this pure, joyful feeling I have isn't real."

"And the energy of your wie is?"

"This is the biggest blessing you'll ever know, Bojack. I want more than anything for you to accept it. For the love of Christ."

Bojack raised his hand in defense. " Just-trying to clarify."

"Yes, Bojack, my wife was the answer. The answer embodied in a physical form-and we should be so lucky to have either of that."

Bojack's stout fingertips curled into his palm, his eyes turning down in thought. His sense of defense was beginning to lessen now, leaving in its wake that soft curiosity of belief. "I guess."

"You don't need to concern yourself with the despair of the world or the hollowness of it just the detriment of the messiness of the species, and I stopped punishing myself for it a long time ago, both alone and with others. I always spent too long being sick and destroying myself over it, and so many people did before me-worrying about things like that and punishing myself for things I don't even exist outside the sin of the sickness of our own species. I've been at nothing but peace ever since then, and everything that I do feels equal, and I've never been more content with being alive."

"Isn't it-lonely?"

"Loneliness is just apart of the imaginary sickness. Loneliness is just you longing for something that isn't really that you don't need, like everything. It's ok to wonder. It's even ok to long for company and to wonder. But once i saw every type of human nature for what it was; I knew it was time for me to let go, and fall both into the good and bad of who I was in my entirety, until I was my own reality of whatever essence I came from to begin with, and in there I was free and healed. The world passes in front of me constantly- with its binges and phases and people tumbling into their chaos- and I stay by myself and detach myself from all of it. People in your sick town might try to and tell small people like me that we're nothing-I don't care. It all passes."

Bojack's hands fell away from the balcony, and he turned his wretched and wet eyes over to his pink deck chairs, ears lowering as his eyelids lowered while he watched where they sat by the pool. Without even quite being aware of it did he begin to search for the ring that Eddie had mentioned; or at least the silver tint of it.

"That does sound nice." He began to walk forward, one hand pressed on his elbow as ears kept lowered.

"The only thing I haven't been able to get over is the longing of my wife."

"Yeah?"

"She was the one thing that was an extension of the purity I found in myself and in other people. She was as pure as life and the energy we come from itself. I could never not long for her, and that's the one ache I can't turn away from or try to talk myself out of the pain of. But unlike the other pain-the kind of empty pain that destroys you from the inside out with emptiness because the rejection people give you isn't even rejection from people you even like or that have soul, just raw abuse, it's the kind of pain that's full and true, a promise of someone worth mourning, and love is behind the emptiness. That's the difference. I don't doubt I'll experience various disorders and illnesses every day for the rest of my life-it's the way it is, and even when you know the disorder is only going on in your own head, there's certain illnesses at certain times in our life we're annointed to that we can't turn away from because of how true it is to our pain. I can't talk myself out of my grief with my wife. I don't think I want to. But I've cut out all the pain and concern of people who don't deserve it; and everything is clear."

"Is that the reason why you started to call about this, uh- wedding thing, then, that you're so convinced that's happening?" Bojack kneeled in front of the circular white table in front of him, head titling as he looked over the leftover scripts he had left out that he head read to fill the void in empty hours, pill bottles, and debris of the times when he had flicked the cigarette dust from his stick. He winced as he titled his head to the side and looked down under the table, then gave a soft hitch and he eased himself further under the table and gazed under the chair, ears lowered and body curled into a crawl as he swept away some of the dust under the chairs and began to search for any signs of the ring.

"I'm sorry, I got away from myself a little bit. The people who came over here,-the one through the blue dogs that I can tell just from the way that you reacted has already visited you to some extent-they actually came up to try to tell me about all their little ideas about what they were hoping that you would give your life to. Said that they wanted it to be that perfect little picture of what they hoped to execute going forward. They said that nobody could ever really be ready for the work going forward or what it's going to lay down or where it's going to lead to long term- but that they certainly want to give a helping hand, and if they could be apart even in the smallest way of the biggest thing in history, that they would want to help and participate in any way they could. That they would want to assist in giving you ease at intertwining and realizing just how much you mean to one another-the climax of your ceremony."

"Makes a little sense." Bojack swept his hand across the under part of the chair until it was clear there was nothing but dust. "I'm not sure why they think that giving a ring would convince me to follow this strange foreign narrative, however-and by the way, there's no ring." Bojack grunted as he eased his body into a sitting up position, ears lowering back as he pressed his palms on his stout legs.

"Small token, Bojack. They wanted to help as they could. And honestly, with the way this conversion feels, I would dar to even agree with them that even the smallest gift could propel your forward. It seems like they really kept their promise. Seems like they're one of the first real people even attempting to try and pull you forward and help you over towards that right enlightenment. I know it's hard to unentangle many years upon years of sickness and of narratives-but none of it was ever real, the same way that that maliciousness that I tormented myself over all those years before I begin to find truth, and I haven't had a genuine day of pain ever since then since seeing the truth of our wretched and laughable species and seeing how little I have to punish myself or anything, how little I never a little I never had to. And I know its going to take a lot of work, but you can get there, too. This species is sick, but there's some who have found the light, and its our job to listen to them and laugh at the sick. Is she there, with you, right now?"

"What, the woman?"

Bojack's head turned over his shoulder as he looked through the sliding doors and pierced over to where he saw you sitting on the gray couch. For the time being, you weren't even taking it upon yourself to turn your head over your shoulder to even look out over towards where Bojack was talking to Eddie, and Bojack felt a soft depression and emptiness as he watched where your body was curled in itself, your head titled down as you played with the rags of your dress, elbow leaned beside the back of the couch, and as depressed and heavy as your energy was, he almost wished that he could have been a part of the energy of your confliction. He knew in part that you had far more worries ahead of you-heavier than he could imagine, and far more complicated than the simplicity of emotional love affairs and conflict, though it almost seemed as if you were full of more concern for the invite Eddie was offering than you were of your future, and if nothing else, Bojack knew that was telling.

"Now I don't know exactly where they would have put the thing. I do know that when they delivered the message, they seemed like they were content just to bring the news of it, and they were full of this sad enlightenment in their eyes that reflected some inherent tragedy of existence-but they were humble and they were in the moment, and they saw everything for what it was and for what it would be; terrible and uncertain and suffocating, but it would have a sense of humanity on the other side of it, something greater than we have the perspective to understand. It was all I needed to take their words for what it was; as a reflection of being in the moment of the way things are, to simply accept it, rather than to have all these tormented narratives of control or what we think it should be. It's all leading to the same end, but when they were around me, I felt a beauty come over me similar to when Lorraine was living and breathing and right beside me. It could have killed me from the beauty; and when they were gone I almost wanted them to be back again, to reflect that human life in me that I can only follow through with wisdom with now until my wife is ready to take me."

"What did the couple look like, by any chance?"

"Decent looking. Lovely. One man, simple human type, well shave enough, and then his wife; a small slender pigeon. Easy and laid back couple, all things considered. Though it was clear how intense they were about their request."

Bojack's eyes widened for a moment at the initial surprise; but he quickly collected himself as much a she was able, rolling his shoulders as he turned his dry eyes back over to the study of your body curled beside the couch. "Yeah. No surprise there. I'm not sure how many people would concern themselves going from place to place following the same lost and stumbling man and making it their business."

"What are you talking about? You're aware of who these people are?"

Bojack gave a quick reset of his breath while he rolled his shoulders as a reset, trying to ease away some of his frustration and tension as much as he was able. He began to clumsily ease himself up on his feet as he lifted himself up into a standing position again, raising out one arm awkwardly as he tried to find his balance.

"Eddie, it doesn't' matter."

"Dosen't matter? We got the same stalker people coming out of this blue foggy wall and telling the both of us something that we know is incredible and feel, and you want to tell me it doesn't matter?"

"Listen, Eddie, the bottom line is that it doesn't matter because I don't care. I didn't even want to play this weird back and forth game of some weird wedding insulation in the first place." Bojack's eyes were defiant as he swept his arm in front of him, eyes dilated and empty in defense. "Can you just let this conversation drop so I can go about with the part where I do manage to take care of the woman with a little bit of dignity on the way out, instead of the both of us doing this monkey dance over two random strangers who don't understand boundaries?"

"How are you going to take care of this woman and place her somewhere safe, anyway?"

"Well, I mean. She's had a long day." Bojack turned as he looked over through the sliding doors of where you were curled, one hand beside his hip. "I think I'm going to let her sleep in my bed tonight like the way that I have been for the past two weeks."

"Uh-huh. And then what?"

Bojack's ears lowered definitely, though his expression was full of more uncertainty now than it was of anything to do with annoyance.

"I don't know, man. And then in the morning we'll go forward from there in terms of where the both of us need to go. I'll try to find her a safe place, hell, maybe I'll ever get her started at an apartment somewhere. I'm not sure how she'll pay going forward, but-there has to be something she can do. One day at a time, as the saying goes." His eyes lowered in his dry and exasperated emotion as he waved his finger in a circle. "So, let's just take that advice and run with it. Can we do that, at least?"

"Bojack, forget about the ring and wedding for a moment. You're right."

"That is the exact direction I was trying to take this in. I'm glad the both of us are on the same page."

"What do you think is going to happen if you let this woman go? Where do you think she's going to go, who is she going to turn into long term?"

"I don't-"

"I don't think you realize what you're doing here, Bojack. An apartment? Really? You think you can just shove her into a small compartment and leave her on her way? You think she can figure that out?"

"It's an address." Bojack's hand placed on his hip as he gazed in front of him with empty detached desperation. "At least she can start to apply to something and see where it goes, right? Get her on her feat?" His expression pouted as his ears lowered while his eyes turned down tentatively.

"This woman has been on her own her entire life. You took her in and you both made this beautiful, perfect heaven with one another in the empty stagance for a little while-and you want to throw that to the side and, what, go back to drinking?"

"I don't know, the aftermath is not something I was thinking about, nor something you should be concerned with." Bojack's eyes eased up into a flicker of annoyance as his eyes snapped upward. "Plus, how do you know how I feel? What told you that?"

"I could hear it from any amount of miles away just from how you talk, BJ-but even more than that, this couple, the one you don't want to talk about that visited the both of us-they made it clear that they knew this was special. And when they came up to me I couldn't take it in to deny it to them. Life is stagnant and hollow and heart wrenching; but what's more important is that we were given gifts of life more than most ever will to find what it mans to be enlightened above all-and you're going to have this conversation and be a coward about it."

"You need to stop bringing up the couple." His aged face closed in annoyance, ears flown back as he waved his hands in front of him and added; "Sorry, but there's no possible way that I'm going to listen to whatever they have to say about anything. The bottom line is that they're a bunch of randoms who decided to make my business theirs for some reason, and believe me, nothing good has ever come out of me following that."

"Ok. I'm sorry. You're right. Baseline here, Bojack, let me ask you; if this woman were to disappear from your life tomorrow, with no way of being able to contact her or know where she is ever again, how would that leave you? You thought in detail about how that would make you feel?"

Bojack's own worn and aged face stayed closed, but this time he gave a soft rasp of a hitch of a breath as he thought, his other hand coming to rub beside his mane as he threaded his palms down his neck. He opened his eyes, soft and tentative and empty as he looked in front of the reflective pink deck chairs reflecting back at him, disposition troubled and empty as he gazed over at the world beyond the balcony in its large and indifferent city lights.

"Right. So. Anyway. Tomorrow morning, after that point, it's just a matter of figuring out where the both of us are going to go from there. I can give her a little bit of my information, obviously I'm not just going to throw on the side of the street like the way that I found her, either way-"

"Right. So these people, that showed up-they said that there should be a small little silver ring that they must have left a little bit of a while ago. said that they would have left it by that giant pool that you've been carrying her around in and every now and then throughout the afternoons that I'm sure that you've tried to invalidate the richness of for the sake of your own comfort for whatever kind of sickness that you're trying to defend."

"What? How do you know about that?" Bojack's ears perked up as his eyes widened, panicked eyes inquisitive as he stepped over one of the deck chairs and stumbled to the side of the balcony. "Did they tell you that?"

"They did. Said the energy from it was one of the only reason why they were able to reach and to find me-to find you. That kind of richness and love and harmony; they knew it like anyway, and gravitated to it like the natural rich thread they said it was. Said they didn't even mean to; as a matter of fact, they were trying to leave this earth anyway. They were well on their way to some kind of resounding peace; but they needed to stay for a while longer. They said where they were going wouldn't be anything worthwhile if they couldn't at least keep this section of the earth smooth and enrichened. The entire point of them leaving was to not deal with this earth anymore, but-they came to recognize that they still wanted to make this earth a bit richer before they left and let it cave into itself, wanted to see if they could enrichen it for their own reassurance. Maybe make where they were going a little bit better."

"There is no way that has come into this house is past couple of weeks. I've had the house on major lockdown to make sure that nobody could bother the very woman they were supposedly so concerned about."

"When you are going to get it? Like I said, when it comes to things that are greater than us, the only thing that you can do is to just be grateful and to pray every day for the relief and to be thankful for it. That's all that there is in the middle of the sickness, and I'm very grateful that I was given the wisdom and the enlightenment to see it for what it all is. To see my personal relief, to be full of nothing but freedom and gratitude within myself as I wait for the end to come to me, rather than being patient to a constant sickness that I have to tiptoe through everyday in order to not feel that way. The world does not have to know me, but my true despair would have been letting myself become a part of the sickness especially once I lost my life, and I didn't. Every single day of my life I've known who I am, even if I didn't talk to a single person, and that's been really all that mattered, and that has been what has carried me."

"Well." Bojack's bittersweet eyes turned forward as he looked over the compact building that sat underneath his eyes and to the road that was still haunting him with the former memory of the couple and blue fog while he turned vulnerable wet eyes down to it. "No matter what you do or don't believe, and no matter what I have to say about it, I don't see any ring here. So either the people that we both saw are just regular creeps that for whatever reason for a period of time made it their focus to go from one efficient location to the other-or they're two people that are not able to go through with their promises and what they believe that should happen anyway. Just two people, going to town with their distraction of their actions every day while the emotional rotten turmoil of things otherwise continues to fly around them without having any actual backup for whatever it is that they believe. I'm not going to insult them over it because I already see people do that every single day with their lives of them trying to make sense of the emotional chaos that's around the physical action but-I'm certainly not going to encourage it."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"They're just more lost idiots, Eddie. That's all."

"So what do you think is going to happen? If you don't allow yourself to be a part of this woman, if you just let her go and disregard that connection so powerful that somehow even I managed to become aware of it and want to try to convince your dumbass to keep it in your life? What are you going to do after, when that emptiness is harrowing in front of you?"

"I don't know. You think that I haven't been already been trying to figure out every little problem all by myself every single day of my life without anything making the slightest remote amount of sense in any other direction? I've been doing everything that I can. Besides-" He lifted up a finger defiantly while his eyes took on a pointed and jaded cocky anger. "You seem like the kind of guy that would tell me that the only way that I could enjoy being alive at this point in my life would essentially be by not truly possessing or being too protective over anything so that no matter what happened or what I lost I could still be content with any given situation. How do you expect me to find that peace if the way that you're talking to me is about if I end up losing her or if I become so connected with her that I can't stand the idea of not having that life? you're speaking in complete contradictions."

"I understand that. I talk to myself about the same problems at times with knowing that I'll never truly be able to get rid of that devastation when I realize that my wife is gone, and that this ache is something that I have to wrestle to find peace with every single day of my life. But if you realize that it's not a fight as much as it is a constant presence as much as yourself is, you can convince yourself that the pain isn't a fight as much as it is an essence only just waiting for you on the other side after life is over, which is just a game that you're playing not meant to be taken too seriously. You'll also realize that even the pain is really just you experiencing yourself and for as long as your humanity and yourself can't be taken away, even in regards to permanently aching after that person that was an extension of that purity, I can promise you that you'll never feel like you're ever truly lost in any given scenario. And that includes losing the one pure person and the love of your life-though once you realize they're an extension of yourself, they're never gone."

"Hey now. I said nothing of relevance to this idea of 'love of my life'. She's a woman I had an exceptional two weeks with. Though if you want to start going into theories, I was having an incredibly hard time even before she came along. And I'm sure you know about the theory of compensating."

"And in your own way I don't doubt it. But it's all relevant to her coming into your life when you've needed her and she you. It's beyond understanding, Bojack, and that's more than ok. What's important is that you stay clung onto what's true. Although you've certainly carried that eternal nature in a clumsy kind of way. But the two of you have hope, even now, and I know it's the end of your life, or feels like it, and there's nothing left-but that poor woman feels the same or worse, and your fractured pieces can come together beyond what you understand. That's the entire point."

"And my point stands that I didn't find a ring given by any of those literal foggy brained people-so. We can go back and forth all night about spiritual and mindful philosophy, but I find a lot more hope in the technical."

"And I'm not asking you to. Not even the couple is. There's nothing more to life other than what surrounds you, and you don't even need another person's company in order to find enlightenment or to find peace in your existence-and I think that's the one thing that drives people to insanity the most, the idea that there should be more, and there just isn't. There's just you and the energy that surrounds you every day every moment and that's all that there is, or ever has been. To try and to find rhythm with that constantly would be something that only the greatest of geniuses would be able to manage-and I haven't met him yet. But if you want to stand here and have this conversation and tell me about how that woman isn't the closest thing that for whatever reason brought you to that sense of enlightenment and that wisdom, that stops you from going from phase to phase and makes you turn inward asking why its not enough, that peace and that rhythm that you've been trying to chase your entire life that I know just from the little time that I've known me that you have, we're both going to have a very large problem. Because I'm not letting this go, and I'm certainly not going to forget about this, and I know that I don't want this to be my problem anymore than you want it to be your problem, and you can say what you'd like about the couple, but we both could feel that they knew what they were doing in the same way that we feel we do in that indescribable way when we both had this blessing of a physical freedom in thee woman. So, what do you think that the both of us should do?"

Bojack took his hands away from where his palm was tempted to ease beside his snout again, and this time he settled for his fingertips curling inside of his palms, worrying etching against the exhaustion that was his warm features. He could feel all of life and the constant ever-changing emotional trends and phases of himself and others constantly passing through and by him-and yet by constantly changing through and by him and with the chaos of constant life had he always been completely controlled by it even as he had known that it was all too ever changing for him to do anything about it or to adapt to it without destroying himself. The non-existence and the fickleness of emotions and other people was ever changing, his sense of self all he had as the years of chaos of life had gone on, and a part of himself wondered if that was what this was now; of you desperately trying to reach out to him and take him along with you and his fickle infatuation, even if you didn't mean to cause his distress through the impulsivity of taking him along with you.

As he took a deep intake of a restart of a breath, he felt the best way to try and stay grounded was to convince himself there was no answer coming either way. His job was to take life for what it was as for what it was without question or tormenting himself with what was beyond what action or decision- and he knew to some degree that his own void of empty and tender anxiety agreed. For once his soul felt as if it was detailed and specific and full of life to the point where there was individual focus where once they had been empty stereotypes and void; and yet the both of them seem to come down to the same conclusion, there was no right way of trying to be able to get rid of the day to day feeling that something always needed to be done other than the void, and you were radiating in your simplicity of welcome in a full and individual enchanted detail that took him away from the slavery of superficial stereotypes and other people's opinions.

"You know what, forget about the ring. if it's not there, it's not there, and I agree that none of us know on any technical level about that couple that came to see the both of us-even though I do think that it's very telling, and if nothing else, you should take that fear along with you and try to keep that unseen quality and faith to ground you with whatever devastation could happen next. Life is about irreplaceable spiritual quality and little else. But don't worry about the damn thing."

"Noted."

Your head turned over your shoulder at the blunt notement; Bojack felt his eyes widen as his ears flew back in vague shame as he caught your eyes turning over your shoulder at Bojack's words that brought more life and attention into the space more than he prepared himself for. He winced as his hands kept pressed beside the door for some physical grounding as he opened his mouth to try and tell you something; anything for the both of you, but your eyes fluttered closed and you turned your head back to where you were cradling your fingertips just as quickly, head titled down as fingertips played with your palms in a timid distance.

"I want to ask you very clearly, and I want you to to figure out who you are and what you're asking going forward with this hogwash plan you've come up with. I want you to think about it in depth, step by step, and figure out what you're going to do tomorrow morning when you get that woman out of your life and when you're back with those four walls and those dumb coping mechanisms that you have that's dressed all over that bloated body."

"I'm not sure if I'm in the kind of headspace for this kind of talk. I'm very confident about the decisions I'm making, by the way. I don't need a step by step."

"What's the first thing you're going to feel and what are you going to do? Because I can tell you that if I know even half a little bit about you that I know more than likely with the answer is going to be, the answer isn't going to be something anybody wants to observe upright. I don't want to have it be my mess in my memory when I read it on the magazine tabloids about what you decide to do anymore than I know that you want to go through with letting you go."

"So your memory is the main concern here, is that it?"

"Bojack, listen to yourself. Look inward. What is it telling you? I don't care if you like me or not. What I want is for you to make the right choice. The circumstances around you are tangible and stagnant, but the emotions are fleeting. The fear you're feeling now is more than you know how to deal with-but it will change. Of course it will. What I want to gather from you is what you think these four walls are going to do to you once you realize the emptiness of the choice you made."

Bojack's head titled downward as he closed his eyes in exhaust, a soft and complicated raspy breath, then turned his eyes upward as he stepped his way beside the gray wall as he looked through the inside of the living room, eyes wincing as he gazed into the stagnant light of the room as your body kept curled beside it. Through the tattered and messy dressings of your body could he see how your ribs poked out from your skin and through the rags, and though you kept reaching out your hand to thread beside the rags that surrounded your body and pulled them over your shoulder and tried to keep yourself adjusted, there was no denying the exhaustion and struggle you were in in regards to the future; and Bojack, without consent, felt the sudden strike through his memory of how you had brightened at the idea of marriage, even as it was obvious you had felt it was your place to refuse and to reject something so good and pure.

Clearly, you had picked up on Bojack's wordless request to detach yourself from the conversation and to leave him alone. For you to be concerned with the argument over the sudden idea of marriage in and of itself was more of an invitation towards the idea of it just from its existence in and of itself, and even the involvement of the context of the conversation made him extensively uncomfortable.

You would take it personally; Bojack knew that much, and that took a toll on his own decision more than he knew how to cope with or reason to. You took it with him thinking even the idea was an insult to whatever ego Bojack carried, but if you had been able to read inside of his inner narrative, it was a crazed sense of shame that he carried beyond control.

"I understand what you're getting at. But what am I supposed to do, just not make a decision and keep her here and take her into an even bigger mess? Getting her somewhere else to stay would be a mercy to the both of us. I don't think its wise to say otherwise. She's had a hard life."

There was some scuffling that came from the other side of the phone; a few breaths of what sounded like a small sigh that came from the other end of the phone. The sound of a bed creaking emitted from the other side of the phone, and Bojack perked up his senses without noticing; his sensitivity was getting the best of him in regard to where Eddie was pushing him, and he couldn't have denied that he wanted that direction.

"I guess you're right."

Bojack felt a slight strike in his mood; a physical drop at the sudden agreement of his own hatred towards saying it. His tentative eyes turned to the city and the compact buildings as his ears flew down.

"You're serious?"

"If you're that determined to convince yourself that any future with you would be terrible, then I won't take it on myself to convince you. I want to lead you in the right direction, but I've had my past with knowing how stubborn you are. If you're convinced, you're convinced."

Bojack chuckled, nervously, clumsily and in a way that admitted his vast mode of uncertainty was playing out in front of him.

"Yeah. I guess that…does make sense. It was what I was going for."

"Look, it's not my mission to guide or to convince you. Never should have done that, and if it came across that way-well, I can promise you I have far more better things to concern myself with. But I can't feel something as important as much as I felt hearing from you, nor when it reaches a couple. If you want to let that woman on by and fall into despair, I won't stop you. But at least be honest, Bojack. Honesty will get you far and wide, at least in regard to clarity of mind. Trust me, it's all that's going to save you in moments of grief when you realize what you asked for."

Bojack was breathing heavily now in a silent and panicked fashion, his eyes dilated in a soft quick panic as his hand kept beside his snout, fingers curling beside the bangs of his mane and his eyes turned down in thought. Now that the net had been released of Eddie's faith in the middle of Bojack's stubborn mood, there was nothing to prevent him from making that cut off from happiness.

He tripped over the chaos in his mind, a physical entanglement of his own anxiety and severe depression ridden mood drops, of what inventing the next couple of days and hours would look like; how his wrong decision would effect the both of your days and the way that you would feel about it. He could offer you as many words about suffering and about how you would find your own answer, as if the entanglement and overwhelming nature that overcame him when in your presence could have been overcome in the wisdom you possessed that overwhelmed him just to take it in; as if there wasn't already everything he was looking for in a partner inside of you and something beyond understanding when it came to satisfaction.

The natural understanding between himself and Eddie, that romantic regard that he had picked up on in the void of Eddie's life when he had met him the first that that his own lack of experience with such depth had been bewildered but had been an epilogue to what he was experiencing now and now increased the understanding of the void-the conflicted peace that Bojack was trying to achieve even as he understood that the more he tried ot avoid the future and of the hole he had been in was waiting for him, the more likely it was to come to him, especially even as Eddie foretold it. There was something even greater and even heavier that was impossible to ignore on the other side of letting you go, and Bojack couldn't bring himself to ignore the answers of dread and of the subconscious insanity waiting for him on the other end of his rejection of you; his mind was giving him the answers whether they were good or bad, and he was a wise enough man to know that his horror in the future if he failed himself was fact, and serving as nothing more than a simple reaction to follow it and its warning.

Regardless, as Bojack's eyes winced while he turned his head back around the corner of the door and took in your body, yourself having straighted yourself up a few inches, no doubt affected by Bojack's observation of you, he could sense how much you were preparing yourself with emotional and physical energy of the future and of what it held-and you were clearing coming back into a sense of a disparining and intense independence. He felt himself step forward to the edge of the corner of the door as he felt a slight caution of a breath of rejection leave his mouth as he watched you, his breath somber as he gave a light pathetic sound of protest; but he found he didn't know what he wanted to say yet.

"Okay."

Bojack closed his eyes tightly as he turned his head down, and he felt the tension overcome his features against as he titled his head downward, ears lowered as his palms gripped beside the phone as he felt hs heart race. His heart quickened, blood rushing as he tried to calm the sudden thread of panic though his body. Even as he felt the panic racing through him, he could already feel and odd centered grounding of peace coming over him in that odd grounded faith that was the easiest and the most tangible it had ever been when it was around you; he could sense an increased understanding of a grounded sense of spiritual resolve that felt so good, joyful, so confident in its natural purpose compared to his usual chaotic and sickly mind that he found to ignore it was almost too darkly cautious to be endured.

To follow the chaos of the narrative in his mind he managed a small nod to himself as he turned his heavily hooded eyes back up to where you were now easing your hands beside the wretched fabric of your body as you pulled it around your toros, yourself rocking as you did so to follow the small narrative of your thought.

Bojack's expression kept protruded and pouted across his features as he began to walk his way to the sliding door again, his teeth poked and ears lowered intensely as he felt the swear easing across his skin as the blood rushing-but in a sense, he was grateful for it, knowing that it was just one of the signs of the several impacts that you had on him with it came to the impossible and devastating reality of the rarity of connection and care, and he had already had to go the majority of his life without love or impact, more than most, but the world had never been shy about depriving genuine connection, and his own already scarred heart had already been far too dysfunctional to live with the emptiness that someone like you had to.

His fingertips trembled and cramped beside his palms as he eased his hands to the sliding door and gradually begin to pull it backward as he begin to step his room inside. Even as he entered the room of your presence he was reminded of the rarest and the hardest thing for Bojack to come by and believe in himself; that joyful endurance known as faith, and somehow, it was impossible not to reach in the wake of your presence. His entire life, he had never seen fighting his cynicism and to lead to everything being a sign of joy as a choice; it had never felt like a choice, and everything had always felt like a bad sign or a reason for anxiety or for shame. Around you, a golden tint of joy and seeing everything as such felt like the inevitability; for the first time, did it feel as if it was as easy of a choice and as much of a reality as much as the inferior and destructive black, and wisdom followed in his heart where you were; the wisdom being humble modest gratitude of life.

He managed to shut the sliding door quietly enough, but it still seemed as if he was interrupting the meditation of whatever inner narrative you were wrestling with yourself on the couch, and Bojack could ever hear how your words were soft and mumbled under your breath as you seemed to be talking yourself through some sor of pain.

Bojack's expression kept timid and unknowing as he turned his wincing and puffed eyes over to the sliding doors, easing his hand beside it as he shut it entirely closed, with the soft shut did he feel the tension of the afternoon begin to pour in. His eyes closed as he eased his hand beside the door and closed it, ears lowering and eyes closed as he tried to find his calm in the middle of his heart still rushing for that moment as he felt his disposition and air tense. He took a deep reset of a breath, rolling his shoulders as he felt the heaviness of his nervousness getting the better of him; but he took another reset of a breath, turned his worried eyes up as he looked up to the ceiling to try and find his calm-and then turned as he faced your direction.

"Listen, Eddie, I'll have to call you back, ok?"

"What? No. Keep me on the line. If you're planning on doing anything, keep me on the line."

"Why?"

"If you're planning on doing anything right now at all, I'm telling you that I want to be a witness to it, you understand me? If you're planning on going to bed and giving up and doing the cowardly thing, then go ahead and hang up the phone. But if you're planning on doing even the slightest right thing tonight for yourself and your wifes' freedom-then please, let me stay on the line."

Bojack's head titled down as a tender nd tentative shame and conflict crossed his expression. He turned his eyes up to where he heard the movement of your body getting itself upward now, the rags around your body now being firmly pulled around your waist. Your energy was complicated and conflicted, and Bojack felt that need to reinvent himself to meet your energy in anyway he could; the heaviness of ego beginning to fall away entirely in the wake of how you were challenging him.

He gave another soft and heavy breath as he closed his eyes and rolled his shoulders as he tried to find his centerment-then turned his eyes forward as he tried to simple stay on the trail of moving forward, blackly terrifying in its unknowing as much as it felt ir was.

His hand came to hide the phone from your vision as he stepped his way close enough for him to be detected by you. You turned as your arms kept wrapped beside your chest lightly as you looked up to meet Bojack's eyes, but he kept his vision turned up to the kitchen and away from yours for a moment to recollect himself.

" I'm going to make the decision that you told me to make, ok?"

"Told you? I didn't tell you anything. I want that to be made very clear, Bojack; I didn't tell you anything. I'm just guiding you through what I know and felt. Anything that you feel-it was already there."

"Yeah. Ok." Bojack closed his eyes as his hand came to rest on the top of his head, expression treamoring a he tried to find his focus. "I don't care what the official term is. I don't even know why I'm doing this, and I highly doubt that it's the right thing. But you called me and you tried to convince me, and I don't have enough incentive to say no, and I don't have enough fight to go against it, so I'm going to try it."

"You're going to propose to her? Get married?"

Your eyes turned to look at Bojack; his eye widened as he turned his body away abruptly, keeping his shoulders closed inward as his entre body became tense.

"Would you keep it down?"

"What's to keep down? She's going to become aware and know it anyway, right?"

"I don't know if it's marriage-I just meant that I was going to talk to her about staying?"

"Bojack, it's ok."

Bojack's eyes opened as he gave a small dilated hitch of his breath, pupils small as he snapped his head upward at the statement. He heard Eddie give a soft breath; part of amusement, and part of his own anticipation as he heard Eddie leaning back beside the bed, and he could sense the emotional wisdom and humor coming from his end.

"There you go, party boy. Let her try her best to talk to you. I'll be right here. Don't even think of me. I just want to make sure you make the right choice."

"I'm sure."

Bojack kept his voice low, matching Eddie's, who spoke with a tender sense of approach of understanding. Bojack placed one palm on the bottom part of the phone as he winced and turned to meet your eyes; there was a sense of knowing and understanding in them as you stepped your way a few paces from the couch, arms crossed as you did so as you looked him him with those red emotional eyes that had long since learned the lesson of being alive for the sake of it; there was a freedom there that Bojack had never been able to break the mold enough to even come close to, but he could still see the unrelenting pain in your expression that gave him a sense of chills.

"Erika. Hey. Hi." His voice was soft and light as he pulled the phone down entirely, keeping his palm beside the iPhone as he gazed at you in soft and graceful question. "What's going on?"

"I don't have to be here in the next few hours. It can be that easy."

"What? No. It's ok. I wasn't asking you to leave. I just-" He gave a pathetic whimper of his unknowing as he turned his conflicted eyes down to look at his phone, and a listlessness overcame what was usually his articulate language. He gave a soft shrug as he turned his eyes down tentatively. "I'm just trying to figure out what this all means. Going forward, and everything. It's not your fault. You don't even need to worry about anything."

Your bittersweet eyes indicated to where Bojack's hand was curled beside the phone.

"Are you sure you know what you want? This is your house, your place. I wouldn't dream of trying to make it more difficult for you."

Bojack's eyes dilated frantically to the phone. His expression tensed in guilt, and he kept his eyes down to the floor as he took his hand off of the phone and rubbed the back of his neck.

"Nothing is difficult in this situation. Not for me. Believe me. It's just that I'm trying to make sense of where this is all going, is all."

You pasued as your eyes kept triling over to the phone in Bojack's hand, though you turend your expression down as you rolled your shoulders, clealry trying to keep yoursel at least somewhat adjusted as much as you were able in the middle of Bojack's conflict where the energy of the scenario laid.

"You can go sleep in my bed, if you want. I don't mind at all." Bojack's eys traield up as he looked over at you with that tender conflciton, ears powered as he gav a soft conflicted hitch of his breath. You turned your eyes don and gave a soft shrug, andlooke dup to meet where Bojack's eyes ere as he gazed at you with his soft conflicted wince.

"What do you want, Bojack? What do you want me to do?"

"None of this has to be a big deal between either of you."

Eddie's tone was gentle and inviting as he spoke on the other side of the phone-careful and meditative voice as he spoke in a form that was clearly aware of the way that he was walking Bojack through the sense of his indecision, an attempt at peace despite the conflict that was in the wreckage of the uneven conversation between the two of you through the conversation.

Bojack's eyes flicked down to the phone as he felt a vague annoyance at Eddie's talk, but also a small panic at the idea that the trail was becoming clearer in the wake of what Eddie was giving him; and he knew he wouldn't ignore it now with how much it felt the other side was suffering if he dared to do so. His eyes trailed back up to yours on instinct to catch how you felt; you only managed a small trail of bittersweet reflection in the bittersweetness of your pale expression as you gave him an unreadable raise of your lips that was more tender than he felt he deserved. There was a forgiveness for Bojack's chaos and conflict there right along with your own pain, even as it was clear that you were in a black conflict as to how your life would go the next day in a black unknowing that Bojack had never experienced in his life. Your words were soft, accepting, and dressed up the black guilt he felt with a tender forgiveness as you spoke;

"I don't have anywhere to go or anywhere that I prefer to be."

"I know." A guilt and pouted pathetic apology. "But-"

"I know that you already know that, but I just want to make it very clear that there's no wrong decision that you could make here that would be a punishment to me." Your eyes turned up as you looked to Bojack with a spiritual ease of confidence with the trail of wherever your life went that was beyond Bojack's understanding, and it seemed as if you were looking at him with a sense of home that for the first time there was a sense of uncaring to what happened as long as there was a reward for the both of you being concerned with staying connected to one another and that sense of home you gave each other of that almost demanding sense of joy that came along with being one another.

"I'm assuming you don't care what happens to you, after all of your life experience?" Bojack gestured to you lightly, and he saw just from the emotion in your eyes that it was already true even as he suggested it; though when it came to the bond of the hope you gave one another, there was no sense of denial in your eyes, and he felt a selfish comfort that you would suffer as he did if the bond was taken away.

"I don't mind what happens, so long as it's for the best of us, yes."

Bojack's eyes eased down into a small thoughtful shame.

"Well, you might want to not worry about that. In a lot of ways I'm in the same boat as you. Except for the-" He rubbed the back of his neck as he turned his eyes upward. "-You know, the roof over my head thing."

In that bond was there a sense of agreeable bondage of completely falling into one another and the thread of joy and home he had always searched for-it was such a joyful and natural feeling that it almost made him feel in denial that there had ever felt like there had ever been a choice to believe in anything other than at least the possibility of the rich hope that you gave him; it was small and only a small image in contrast to the chaos of the world around him and inside himself of what had been a thread of an impossibly painful life drenched in complication and hidden and undiscovered pain, but it was so enduring and true that it felt, for once, that it was as true as much as he bad.

His sense of feeling unforgiving and undeserving increased, poisoning the feeling and polluting his mind as to what he needed to do-though he knew he wouldn't have been able to deny the selfish act. He met your own tender and softened, pained and bewildered eyes as he felt his heart pace along with the decision he needed to make; the connection you had with one another was far more forgiving from your end in contrast to his wreckage of insecurity, but it had that same warmth of agreement from either end, and there seemed to be something too soft and beautiful about it, too confident in its joy, for him to consider turning away or breaking it.

But it needed to be fully said.

"I can be out of here in the next couple of hours, or I can stay here for as long like if you feel like it would benefit you. I don't mind, either way."

"Right." Bojack's eyes turned in that reflective and empty ease. "Nothing to lose, right?"

A sadness emitted in your expression as you continued to undress him to the point where he could see you affected by the complex beauty of it-his expression turned up to meet your own as he saw the layer of wet coming over your vision from being overtaken by him. Whatever you saw, he didn't feel it; but he felt the resounding complexity of it and the compelling and profound emotion in your eyes, more than he could believe could ever be emitted, much less than from himself.

"No. Please. This isn't about me or about what I want come up with."

He said it with a tender edge of insistence and with an urgency in his tone as he stepped forward, his eyes turning as he met your own with a sense of urgency, a desperation in the melancholy of his wretched eyes as he stepped his towards you, and one hand came to reach out with the intention of curling it beside your palms, though it was only softly suggested, and he only did it because he could see that vague insanity in your eyes that came from behind forced to be truly alive that wa deprived in his own from cowardliness; now he felt a sense of hesitance at the idea that he had ever thought it would be a good idea to be comfortable and sane.

"What do you want? What do you think works for you? Because that's what would help me, far more than just being pampered from my end of things. Believe me."

His expression was saddened, his eyes just as much as he indicated towards you with that somber heavy tone.

His eyes were modeled with his clear own sense of conflict as to what he was trying his best to execute; one thing is clear, he couldn't deny the sense of that complete sense of that reality of grounding between the both of you and the richness of your bond, and he knew that the both of you were in clear understanding that no matter what else happened, trying to ignore it or to invalidate it was out of the question. But you said nothing; your eyes only turned down, and he could tell he hadn't even come close to talking you clearly through what he wanted.

"What do you want?"

He paused in his direction to you and instead settled to going over to the kitchen counter, placing his phone down as he turned his body back over to you, leaning his hips beside it as he tried to find the courage to walk to you again.

"You have as much as a choice as much as you think I do. I'm giving you that. I feel as if it would be cheating myself somehow if I didn't, so."

Eddie's voice was silent from the other side of the phone for now, though Bojack had made a point to place the button on speaker to fill the room. His eyes were turned down in melancholic reflection for a moment, but he took to turning his eyes up as he looked you over. You kept your head turned to the side, rocking your body slightly, arms cradling your chest as your eyes eased down in thought as you looked aimlessly in front of you. Bojack felt the muscles on his face tense, but he felt a somber patience come out of him even through his dense fear and frustration.

"There's no positive here, no bad thing. There's no limits here, nothing that could be a no. I just want to know what you think you can get out of this. I'm the one that doesn't have anything else to lose, I can promise you that. There's nothing to worry about, just in regards to what you want to do and what you want to go."

You gave a soft breath as you brought your shoulders closer to yourself as you turn your head over to the side and away from Bojack's attempt at being able to read you, and he already knew what your answer was even before you spoke it, and he wasn't sure what was more harmful; the idea that you know it and that you didn't feel safe to speak it, or that you thought it was wrong; or the fact that Bojack knew he was far too much of a self-indulgent coward to deny himself from entering your invitation. One thing he did know beyond a doubt; the misery you felt was real, and his was as well, just as was the black fear, and he knew that to accept and to acknowledge truth, even as difficult as it was, felt like the most promising and refreshing thing either of you could hope for. To look at the misery and the truth of the fear and pain straight in the eyes was the most compelling and worthwhile acknowledgment of Bojack's state of being he had ever know in the longest while; to simply take it upright and forth, rather than deniability or the fogginess of distraction.

"I don't think it would do us either any good to try and deny it from either of us. Or to deny where this is going long term or the actual truth of it." Bojack tried his best to talk confidently, his eyes darting as he looked you over, and his voice broke lightly as he added with a soft tone; "What we feel, anyway."

He wished that the feeling of his bond with you would give him an overpass of perspective-he wished that he knew that if the both of you decided to dedicate yourself to the constant unknown molding of the future, that there would be a sense of a rail of control over the thrashing of indefinable pain that came upon his life throughout in his constant terrifying life, and your darkness brought to a sense of controllable peace; that even if the pain never left, there would be a gradual and mature acceptance from both of your ends and wisdom within it that would lead the both of you to a rich truth and peace, even with seeing the horror for everything it was. That he could have had more of a perspective of what he would need from if you let you go and if he allowed his cowardly fear to trust.

But there was no simple answer of what the future looked like or of how it would change in front of the two of you; whether the both of you decided to dedicate yourselves or to fall apart into the simplicity of the unknown, and your head kept tilted to the other side and away from Bojack's sight, your arms still cradled beside your torso as you swayed, and it was clear that no matter what you spoke for the sake of his reassurance, your enduring and centered essence of the core of your body that had endured all fatal circumstances didn't know, either.

"I'm sorry." That timid shame came across Bojack's expression, and you turned your head over to looked Bojack over as his dim eyes turned to meet yours. "This is all happening too fast. I know that you have a lot more to lose than I do. I know that you're the one that's looking to going out into the street if things don't work out. That's why I want you to make the choice. This is a lot about you more than it is about me. Bottom line." He gestured to you lightly with one hand; almost shyly. Your wet and bittersweet eyes turned down as you followed the gesture of his hand lightly. "You carry the pain well, anyway. If that means anything. I've never met anyone who is in the scenarios you are and takes it with the amount of endurance you do. That's something to keep with you, anyway." He shrugged lightly as he turned his eyes down, rubbing the side of his arm. "Much more than I would be able to, or the dozens of other selfish people I know who have everything and still barely manage to get it by. You see the endurance and faith where people can't even in better circumstances. That is a gift, believe me."

Your head turned fully over to Bojack, though your eyes kept from meeting his entirely, eyes turned down in detached thought.

"It's a part of our human nature, I think, to find hope, or at least peace, even in the most detrimental scenarios."

Bojack's ears perked up, his eyes daring to turn up to meet yours. "Yeah?"

"Or, if nothing else, to find a certain stoic acceptance with the inevitable. It's our nature to find some peace or hope, even on the surface where it's clear that there's really none at all." Your eyes kept downward, easing onto the floor in that exhaustive thought. "I'm sure that people like me must seem pathetic to people like you for even trying, or even attempting at having any endurance or survival."

"That's not true."

Bojack spoke it with such intense insistence that your eyes snapped up to meet his again, and the pale exhaustion and conflict on your expression didn't lesson, but there seemed to be a sense of clarity now with the intensity in Bojack's voice.

"Just come down to the conclusion. Nothing else matters except to come down to the conclusion. That's the only thing that there's ever been, and that's all that those ever going to be. And that's all that there is ever going to be. You're both so close. Feel it."

Eddie's voice was easing with a sense of grace from the phone; it was loud enough from the speaker Bojack had left on low volume that he could hear the soft invitation through Eddie's voice, earnest and encouraging enough that Bojack couldn't deny Eddie's compelling narrative of encouragement.

Bojack's ears lowered in vague insecurity as he turned his head over his shoulder with a slight pout, his fingertips coming to curl beside his palms, though he couldn't help but feel a small thread of comfort towards Eddie's faith again; it was certainly perforable to the alternative of him meeting Bojack in his faithlessness.

Horrifying as it was, Bojack was beginning to realize that the worst thing that could happen at this point was having his faith taken from him in regards to what your existence gave him; there was apart of him desperate to cling onto Eddie's vision that there was hope and a way for Bojack to find his humanity, even now, towards the last most marred years of his life; and yet it was the sense of darkness and emptiness that was also part of the reason as to how he felt the most profound joy in what you would give him, were the both of you to simplify your souls enough to allow it.

Bojack took another quick, deep intake of a breath as he tried to restart his nervousness, rolling up his shoulders as he did so while he tried to ease the black tension away from himself as much as he was able while he anticipated what he wanted to say to you next, knowing that this would seal the next phase of what could exist for the two of you. He turned his head to you, eyes winced in their tentative bloated exhaustion as he watched your eyes trace the couch in that bittersweet edge of your exhaustion as he saw the entire life of conflict within them, shoulders still kept firmly inside of yourself as you kept yourself apologetic and within.

His eyes darted to the side as he spoke, tentatively; "Look, if nothing else, it's clear that you're uncomfortable. and that we're both tired, so- " His eyes turned downward as he rubbed the back of his mane, threading his fingertips through his mane as he did so as he tried to find a thread of a narrative he could give you. He took to rolling his round shoulders as he did so as he turned his eyes down, ears lowered as he did so as he looked down beside him and tried to find the words as to how he could go about the next step; he didn't know what it was, but he did know the feeling of it, and it both intimated him and exhausted him more than he knew how to cope.

Finally, he gave a simple heavy breath, feeling the weight of it as it left him.

"Why don't you just come over and go into my bed, clear your head and try not to worry about it. At least for the night. I don't care about whatever it is that you decide in the morning or whatever it is that feels like, but I do feel like we both owe it to each other, at the very least, to just take things for what they are for the night and to not worry about it." He waved his hands in front of him in a timid and awkward gesture as you looked him over. "Either way, as long as you feel okay. Of course."

Your eyes blinked lightly; you turned your head back over to the silver and cheap ring in your fingertips as you rolled it between your palm and looked it over. Bojack felt the pout on his expression increased as he watched it roll between your fingertips.

"Did you place this thing on here earlier?"

"Oh." Bojack's eyes turned to the ring. "Uhm-"

"Just out of curiosity." Your arms crossed as you straightened your body upward, crossing your arms as you met Bojack's tentative eyes while you met his. A soft, sickly humor entered your eyes as you added; "A little bit before bed conversation, if you actually are going to let me go in your bed."

"Yes. Yeah, sure, of course." His eyes paused in their complicated emotion as he looked you over, darting his eyes away from the ring as much as he was able as his eyes tentatively met yours."Why?"

Your turned your eyes back over to the ring in your palm, easing your eyes as you looked it over and threaded the ring in your fingertips in a meditative curiosity. Your body began to curl beside the couch as you pressed your arm beside the back of the couch, curling beside the end of it as you eased your back beside the arm of the couch. Bojack's eyes followed yours in his soft curiosity as he watched your head tilt down to the ring; you seemed drawn to it, thoughtful and vaguely weak.

"Where did you find it?"

After a moment of trying to overcome his sense of sickness and hesitancy, he walked his way around the couch, his hands cramped beside his chest tentatively. He paused as you watched you curl it beside your fingertips, eyes distant in an inner narrative; after a moment Bojack took to kneeling his stout body in front of you, plush body curling inward as his eyes turned and looked you over, ears lowered back in soft question as he watched you turn it in your fingertips. He gave a soft breath as he winced and reached his hands up to press beside your palms-or attempted to, but he gave a soft uncertain whimper and a soft rasp as he curled his fingertips back into his palms, turning as he watched the meditative turn of your ring in your fingertips.

"It's been there for about the last hour or two. I wasn't sure-and I didn't want to bring it up just in case it was something that you just happened to have around you, or in case that it had nothing to do with me, but-I figured that I may as well mention it, since everything was incredibly awkward anyway."

"I wouldn't say that it's awkward."

He said it with a soft edge of light, gentle humor as he followed you through your inner musings; his lip was raised up with a small and light smile as it met his eyes as you turned your eyes up to meet his soft grace of meeting you with a more forgiving playful air. He could feel the way his heart quickened again- but this time it almost seemed as if it was the good kind of pressure, and he felt his hand reaching forward again, only for his fingertips to cramp back inside of his palm. There was such a trail of existence now that there was no way that he possibly could have been invalidated with how rich it was; something tangible enough that to deny it felt like nothing less than something that would be so cruel against something natural that he couldn't even amuse the idea of it without an intense sense of suffocation right after. To run away from the field of rich inner life felt like death.

He gave another soft hitch of an uncertain breath as he turned his eyes down to the silver ring as you readjusted your body to lean further back to the couch, and there was a soft, almost tentative question in your eyes as your expression glimmered that he knew that you wanted him to read. It was silent from your end, though he could feel the energy unlike anything else that was coming from your request even as you turned the ring in your fingertips, and he took to turning his eyes to the side, shame eased into the emotion of his expression.

He kept his stout thighs kneeled in front of the softa as he turned the pout of his tentative question back to look you over, opening up his mouth to speak something, only for it to close again just as quickly as he looked you over tentatively, expression pouted and eyes eased over your expression. You said nothing, though the almost bashful way you kept your head down while you continued to turn the ring in your fingertip seemed as if it spoke all he needed to know. The ring flashed in your fingertips, and Bojack's eyes widened as he turned his head to the side into an extension of increased curiosity as he looked the ring over; it was a simple cheap silver layer against the material, a few scratches to show for it. His fingertips flicked beside his palms as he dared to reach out a hand again towards where your fingertips were dancing around it in meditative thought, his eyes trailing up as he undressed you with the truth of both of your lives; truth, as it turned out, had been more than enough, and it was the only thing that felt refreshing in the wake of what was otherwise waste and muggy distraction of the raw narrative going on inside.

Bojack cleared his throat as he reached up a hand and pressed it around your own hand that was threading your fingertips beside the ring. Your eyes looked up from where you were clearly using it as a leverage of trying to distract yourself from what was actually going on and from what you were clearly asking for as Bojack's fingertips came to curl your hand. That playful and reassuring casual look in his eyes didn't leave as he allowed his own chubby hand to press fully and squeeze beside your hand, the other coming to gently caress up against the back of yours. You began to straighten up as you looked over at him with the strike of curiosity, your eyes threading and looking back up against his own as you did so as you begin to come back into yourself with a newfound sense of alertness in the wake of the way that he was giving his own soft messages over to you.

"You know that you can just say whatever it is that you want to do, right? That's the entire point of why I'm giving you this chance to think over what you really want."

Your eyes were quiet, fortelling, and ominous as you met the wonder of Bojack's; at least he felt it was just from the way you looked a him. And then, with a bittersweet and chilling statement from the message behind it and how much he believed you meant it;

"I don't think I can."

Bojack's eyes darted as he looked between yours, and the message the both of you were speaking was clear.

"I know."

His eyes were tentative and his voice wavered, but he certainly meant what he said-and you could sense that he did, just as he did you. Your eyes flattered down you looked back over towards the ring as you began to see the way that your pale fingertips poked out over through Bojack's chubby fingertips while he kept his hands pressed up against the side of your palm. Slowly to his eyes dart down in focus, although he didn't dare stop from turning his eyes to dart up and focused on you every now and then as he saw the way that the ring gradually began to open up from your palm. He felt the way that a nervousness began to increase against him as he looked over at the silver flash as it gleamed from your palm. Your own eyes flickered upward as you looked over it with a sudden flash of striking emotions eyes as you did so-and then stoic kind of acceptance eased up against your expression as you did so as you begin to see the way that Bojack's fingertips placed it up in between the tip of his own two fingertips while he looked the silver over.

He turned his eyes to look it over as he began to watch every single complex emotion dress up against your features that came along with the complication of the inner human psychology exercised on your face. His expression grimaced in intensity as he did as he took your hand and began to place his fingertips over yours through the ring stumbling between both of your palms. The ring flipped between the intimacy of both of your hands as Bojack's hands jumbled as he threaded the middle part of your finger with two of his fingertips, and gradually did he begin to slip it on without questioning or even wondering why or where it was going- only knowing that he needed to, and ignoring anything other than the sensation of the physical act of doing it, and most especially not paying attention to where it was leading or how it was leading to.

He continued to give out soft and tentative breaths as he did so as his eyes flicked up and dilated in emotion as he watched the way that it slipped up against your ring finger. His eyes turned up as he looked over you as he allowed his chubby fingertips to tremble as it threaded up against the ring to press beside your fingertips turned his eyes over to focus on it as he allowed his hands to gently squeeze up against your own as your own red and bittersweet eyes flickered up over towards his while you watched the age of his concern of his face concentrate.

"Here we go."

He gave you the sane playful raise of his lip while his attempt at confidence met your layered questioning eyes as he squeezed his hands up against your own as he threaded his fingertips up against yours, allowing his eyes to gently guide against yours into a travel of reassurance as you looked up against him with the genuine look of layered emotion your question as you did so.

"That''ll do it." His voice was simple, charming, and accepting of the situation this time, allowing the physicality of what he was feeling to take the majority of his panic and unknowing as he looked up at you with an attempt of trying to be able to at least vaguely bring a little bit of sense of grounding to the both of you within the wreckage of your emotions and of the anticipation in front of yo both, He eased his stout legs back with a grunt. "At least that makes it so that you can say that we both made at least one definite decision in the middle of you being here. That has to count for something, right?"

You said nothing for a moment- your expression was unreadable as you turned your focus over to the small silver ring that was now sitting simply on your fingertip. You let out a soft laugh after a moment, and Bojack watched you, tentative and uncertain, and trying is best to follow the casualty as much as he was able to even though the both of you could hardly admit what it meant what he had done, and even less of what it would lead to.

"Did you actually get over yourself?"

Eddie's voice hitched up over through the air as he did so from the phone, and although his voice was clearly obviously muffled from the way that he was only speaking from the fairly low volume tone of the phone, Bojack's eyes flickered over towards it as he began to feel the way the intensity of his doubt overcame -realizing that the situation was not completely hidden the way that he would have liked, and he gave an abrupt and frantic breath of panic as his ears flew up.

And then he settled for a soft, amusement breath as he began to realize that at the very least, the one person that was perceiving him was the very person who had insinuated it in the first place. His eyes looked back over at you as he met your eyes tentatively, you only gave him a small and sickly but warm amusement- he returned it, and with a grunt he began to lift his body upward as he looked over towards where he left the phone where Eddie was still listening, and with your hand playing up against the side of the silver ring that was placed on your fingertip without cause or reason did you gradually begin to raise yourself up from where you were curled up beside the gray couch, following Bojack as he made his way over to the phone.

"Now I know that I didn't just hear what I did for nothing. Tell me, what happened?"

He pressed his hands against the phone, hearing the crickets and the various sounds of it that seemed like the natural peacefulness that came over from the other side of Eddie's place; as well as a sense of grounding peace that he felt just from the virtue of talking to him. But Bojack tried to get a sense of control as quickly as he was able as he leaned his body beside the counter, eyebrows raised in that attempt of dismissive confidence as he did so as he reached out his hand and gestured to you from where you stood up from the couch with uncertainty, your fingers playing nervously with your ring, expression as emotional and delicate as ever as you gazed at Bojack with that bittersweet question.

"We were just trying to make sure that we could do at least one thing so that we could agree that this wasn't all just a complete waste of time of going back and forth and being indecisive in unknowing."

"Really? You could've fooled me."

Bojack gave a slight dismissive grunt of acknowledgment and indifference to Eddie's wit. He turned his attention to you as he looked over you as he saw the way that you gradually begin to walk up to him with your fingertips still playing up against the ring until you were only a few inches away from Bojack. He didn't necessarily pull you in as you stood beside him a few inches away-but he could feel that tension in the odd agreement between the both of you; this night had already made a decision, whether he admitted it or not, and already he was feeling at least the vague suggestion of that of what it would mean going forward within life, though he didn't know if he had it in him to treat the admitted wordless action up front.

"Eddie, I think you may as gotten the wrong idea. Yes, we've had an intense time. But I'm taking her to somewhere quiet, easy, where she can think-"

He heard the way that Eddie let out a slight, large cackle from the other side of the phone, loud enough that it caused Bojack's eyes to dilate in panic as his ears flew upward from the sudden confident force of it. He nervously snapped his ears back as he winced while he turned his head over to the side of the windows just to ground himself as he heard the continuously loud and high pitched confidence of amusement from Eddie that was within it-more than just confidence that Eddie executed was it really more so of the sense that he had a complete sense of knowing surrounding him as his body was turned back, and Bojack lowered his eyes in exhaustion while he shook his head as he heard the way that Eddie continued to let out loud cackles that sounded almost powerful in his confidence as it raised into the natural air and melded with the crickets on the other side of the phone; a stark and natural contrast to the indifferent white walls that surrounded him.

"You do realize that you are a witness to this as much as we are, right?" Bojack's eyelids lowered as he gazed in front of him in that exasperation he held, even as he felt a slight hope at the denial of his belief that denying his actions or any hope was reality. "Just because you think that you have a leverage against what we don't know or because you think that you have this knowledge against everything with us does not mean that you actually do. Your witness to this complete aimless night is as bad as much as we are-the ones that the ones that executed it in the first place, by the way."

He turned his focus as he looked over at you, if only the check to make sure that you were generally on the same page emotionally as he was. There was a part of him that knew beyond what he could stand at this point in his wreckage of an inner life that he knew that nothing would have hurt him more, or you in turn, or would have destroyed him more than feeling as if he had given you a little bit of hope and relief that he had shared what you had the past couple of weeks undeniably. If he were to leave to even the slightest sense of pain from your end or to shut the door after the opening of rare relief he had given you, whether or not he intentionally meant to do so, he knew it would be the shadow on the other side of the light the both of you felt.

Your eyes were still exhausted and bittersweet, and you only gave him a light reassurance of a small smile that seemed as if it was the best you could manage, and yet even just that lightness of freedom from your attempt at reassuring Bojack he wasn;t stepping in one direction or the other of some wrong way he couldn't see yet wasn't passed. He felt a small relief go through him that for now, everything was still manageable; there was now more than enough room for him to continue to at leas try to make reasonable decisions. He gave you a small raise of his lip as it met his soft eyes while he looked into your own as his own turn of agreement towards your contentment.

"I'm going to take her to bed."

His ears lowered while he tried to move forward with the small permission you gave im as much as he was able; he snapped his eyes up with a roll as he continued to hear the way that Eddie's genuine sense of amusement in his cackles of confidence from the other side of the phone intertwined with the nature that was surrounding him. Bojack gave a soft and exasperated sigh as he eased his love handles further beside the counter as he continued to let Eddie's voice trail out in his confidence.

"All right, I get it. You're very blunt and straightforward about what you do believe in, by the way. No doubt from your end."

"No reason for doubt, Bojack." Eddie's voice was tender and more emotionally somber as he began to come down a bit from his crackles, though that carefree spirituality in his voice didn't leave him. "I've seen everything for what it is for a long time."

Bojack snapped his hand onto one of his ears as he tried to found his recenter; Eddie was pushing him in the very direction he was terrified of. In the corner of his eyes, even as he tried to ignore it now, he saw you step a few more inches towards Bojack. Though your disposition was someone not demeaning and if anything was apologetic and soft in air, he turned his head to the side sharply, raising up one hand to place under the iPhone's speaker to keep you from indulging further in something he didn't know if he wa steady for, much less to confirm to.

"Look, Eddie, this is serious. I get that you think that you have this genius insight, but you admitted yourself that you weren't exactly sure why that couple showed up with you, or why they showed up with us, or what's going on, in general. Just that you felt it. Is it possible that I'm just trying to follow whatever it is that feels good to me too, instead of just constantly questioning it?"

"You don't have any right to start getting all defensive after all that."

"I'm not getti-"

"What a show that you always put on." Eddie's voice was amused, reflective, raspy in his own emotional contentment. "I thought it was ridiculous last time just how much you were in denial of anything good that could come to you but this-this was a whole new level of it."

Bojack gave a soft breath, turning his eyes back over to you as he looked where you were stepping and swaying lightly in your emotional uncertainty. His eyes were defensive and hard as he met your vision, but underneath his hard and defensive layer of his emotion were they mostly bewildered in his devastated and conflicted fashion.

"What would you want me to do, then?"

His palms rested behind the edge of the counter as his ears kept lowered back, looking up in front of him with a dim and empty look in his eyes in an attempt of void of defense. You stayed stood by the side as you watched him, though it seemed as if you knew your wordless place in the scenario now; you head titled down, hands gripping beside your clothes. Bojack felt the hard, exhausting annoyance in his eyes increase as he waited for Eddie's cackles to begin to leave-as carefree and as a natural as much as that Eddie himself had been whenever he had been caught in moments of reminiscing about his wife that Bojack had been taken by even when he had first listened to him the first time and had been incapable of understanding what it felt like to be loved by another so deeply-or connected at all.

He had been stood by the lake in the middle of the night when Bojack, mane disarrayed and eyes heavy and lowered with lack of sleep and age of face especially prominent, had stumbled out onto his porch in the late section of the night as he had played with detachment with a cigarette placed in the middle part of his fingertips as he had walked his way outside, disgruntled and uncomfortable while he had rested his elbows beside the balcony. The lake had been the only thing in its illuminated light in contrast to the bright light fro the full moon as the wall of loud crickets had surrounded and accompanied the rustling of the trees around the lake.

He had turned empty, tired eyes up and over to where he his foggy and exhausted attention was directed to where Eddie's voice had been high pitched and humming throughout the night; his wings had reflected by the illumination of the moon and had passed through his wings, adding to his flair of his carefree nature tha tonight, and in his hands a simple photo of his wife. His mumblings and musing had been nothing less but a reflective and playful contentment as he his voice had trailed through the air, voice raising up as it smoothed through the natural sounds of nature; but Bojack had been reminded about humanity that night and the grounding and tangible feeling of it more than ever that night, and it had physically turned something in him; a light of contrast of something known as clarity of humanity, versus the moggy and foggy black of something indescribable and fully felt as the dusty night had gone on with him sleeping in the four walls of the dark cabin earlier that night. The contrast had almost been painful, and he couldn't have taken it upon himself to listen to its lesson.

It had been one of the few things that he had received in the longest time that hadn't been completely hollow in the way that he had known and had met with existence-one of the few things that was slow in its confident meaning and rhythm, full and simply as it was, unconcerned with anything else, and seemed as if it was in that natural nature with existence, rather than always trying to fight it or to being denial of it or to impress some sinful construct of reality that didn't exist.

"I don't gotta walk you through it." Eddie's voice gradually began to lesson to a small and slightly more controlled tone, though his cackles were still present in their sober amusement. "It's all very clear, for now. And thank god. Something needs to be every now and then, at least for a little while."

Bojack's ears few further down, along with the slight defiance in his eyes.

"If you want to say anything more to us, the woman in question that has a lot more clarity with the way that she carries herself right here than the guy you keep thinking is worth nothing more than to laugh at. You might have a more-" He turned his frustrated expression over to you, and you only gave him a small, quick nod, raising your eyes up in a gentle, if not sickly, forgiveness. "-Easy time talking to someone like her instead of trying to talk me through this."

"Now don't tell me that after all that that you're seriously considering kicking it up over towards a curb and going back to your little drinking escapade."

"No. That's not-"

"-Or even worse, something that I know that I don't even hear about anymore because the people around me in this camp are smart. They're not sick like all of you entertainment consuming folk that constantly deny yourselves your natural nature every second of every day and wonder why you ever need to stumble over yourself to distraction in first place to give yourself a little bit of relief."

Bojack had his hand raised up in a delicate defiance. " No, Eddie, I this point, it's just a matter of the fact that we're both exhausted." He gave a soft hitch of a breath in his uncertainty, turning his eyes as he gazed at you with his melancholic and layered eyes, ears lowered. He felt a certain kind of peace overcome him when he saw you raise up your eyes to meet his from where you were keeping your head down a moment before; there was an exhaustion in your eyes, and he could see how much you were fighting your fatigue. His eyes turned back over to the living room, defiance in his eyes, set in decision.

"Whatever it is that we decide to do, we'll figure it out in the morning."

"Like hell you will. If you ask me, if you if you even knew for half of a moment about just how big of a deal what it is that the both of you just discovered, what it is that I discovered just from being around it, you would know that not even for half a second should you deny yourself being able to fully intertwine yourselves into a promise for your climax and bond. You need to protect yourself, the both of each other, and you need to do it resoundingly and with a complete and absolute sense of peace. That's the only way now. That's always been the only way, and now you have a small window to do it."

"I'm sorry. What logic is this going by?"

There was a slight gently amused mumble time that came from the other side of Eddie's end as he seemed to give an emotionally content gentle knowing amused amusement from his side. Bojack turned his head to you as he looked over you as you raised up your lips and gave him a light shrug, attempting to ease your attitude into a sense of causality; but your fingertips playing beside your ring gave you away. The emotion in his eyes dimmed as he rolled his shoulders and tried to keep himself calm in communicating with you as best as much as he was able to, though his announce and wreckage with Eddie and his own subconscious knowing of what he wanted and where this was going was overcoming his sense of control more than he knew what to do with.

"No logic, Bojack. I let go of logic a long time ago. The only thing that's left now is taking and accepting, taking and accepting. And, above all-a sense of constant companionship within your own self and invention. There's no other choice, once you see this world for what it is and what it'll do to you if you don't. You understand me?"

"No." His head titled to the side as the annoyance didn't leave his features, though a glint of uncertainty didn't leave his eyes as he felt it strike though his attempt at stability. The muscles on his face treamord as he added; "I don't know. I'm just trying to roll this unprompted conversation forward the best that I can. I only called you to clear up the air in the first place. I think the best thing I can do now is take her to bed, help her rest a little bit." His teeth poked out from his mouth in that tentative, soft and questioning way as he turned his tender eyes over to where you stood, giving a soft awkward whimpered breath as he tried to keep his sense of control. His other hand came to rest on the bottom of the phone as he leaned his cheek against it and spoke; "Did we clear the general air with one another here?"

"Who made you call me?"

"The couple. The, uh-" Bojack closed his eyes as he waved one hand in a circle to come up with an answer. "The one that came and showed up to you in the first place. Or at least, they were the ones that came up with the letter, which caused enough questions that it forced me to come and call you. Naturally."

"Ah. I get it. And that ring that they told you about-you got it with you now."

Bojack's eyes darted around the room, empty in focus, as he took in Eddie's words.

"Yes. We did find it."

"Where is your wife now? She feeling alright"

Bojack's eyes lowered as he gripped his palm beside the back of the counter.

"She's not my wife, Eddie." His voice was somber, tired, edged. He briefly heard a soft breath come from your end, but he didn't dare to lift up his attention to you now.

"Great." Eddie's voice was hitched and pipped up with encouragement. "Now, where did you put the ring?"

"The-ring?" Bojack's voice broke as he spoke, and that naturally apologetic, pathetic uncertainty came into his eyes as he winced and turned his questioning unknowing over to you, expression tense in uncertainty. Your eyes focused on Bojack, eyes meeting in his in a soft guide of focus. "I, uh-put it on her finger. Just now." His eyes lowered, thoughtful and with a forced guide of acceptance as he added; "She was playing with it, and I wanted it to have a place where she-" His eyes darted in front of him, detached and empty in a guide of emotion. "-I wanted to make sure she had a place to securely place it."

"And that place was on her finger?"

Bojack took a roll of a breath, rolling up his eyes as he turned his head upward to the ceiling, diam and neon from the pool.

"Yeah." Bluntly, straightforward. "Yeah. Best place to, ah-be."

"So the two of you have already agreed, then."

"What? Agreed to what?'

"I know that you're full of pain, Bojack, and I know how hard it is to try and see through the fog of where you are and where you've put yourself and what you believe. But there's always room for invention; and if you live as if there isn't, I can tell at this point of your life there won't be anything but emptiness and eventually your destruction if you don't do something about it. I'm not saying that you need to figure everything out tonight, and much less do I expect you to understand it. But existence can only come from where you allow yourself to carve out your humanity. Do you think that woman is someone who can guide you through life in the future, or do you want to keep destroying yourself and want to find out what happens next along with that kind of pain? Because when iI came to my own sense of understanding in life, I began to understand a certain sensitivity to the soulful and the soulless-and with where you are, Bojack, it's not going to be good."

Bojack's eyes raise into a further hard flair, the muscles on his face tense.

"I don't especially think I believe your analysis of what you think I should do, or how tangible what you think will happen is."

"Uh-huh. Tell me, what were you planning on doing the few days before you found the woman? What kind of thoughts were you having?"

"Thoughts?" Bojack's voice raised into an uncertain hitch, and he gave a soft breath as he turned his eyes downward, keeping the phone cuddled beside hi embrace as ears lowered. "I'd rather not get into that."

"You don't have to tell me. I already know, just from the sad sack weight of how you carry yourself every single day the way you do and in your very voice, Bojack. Even if I wasn't enlightened, you carry it around with you heavier than I've ever known anyone."

"Ok. Yes." There was an increased edge to Bojack's voice as he spoke, ears flown down." So what do you want me to do?"

"Dedicate yourself to her, Bojack. It'll be the best and only right feeling thing you've ever done."

Bojack's eyes widened as he turned his head to the side beside the phone. "What?"

"It'll be full. Grounded. Worthwhile. It'll make you full-in a way I know you never have. You already did the action, now you just need the promise. Or do you want to go back to being as sick as you were again? You only have so much time left, Bojack, and I know that's devastating; but you'll be rewarded all the more going forward with this woman. The more you face the pain of unfulfilled humanity, the sooner you can accept it, you understand?"

"Accept what?"

"Christ-is the woman right there with you now?"

Eddie's voice was high pitched in his sudden performative impatience, and Bojack gave a slight jolt as his words and the sudden demanding insistence to his tone. He turned his tentative and wincing eyes over to you as he met your expression, and a sense of resolve came over him as he said, somberly;

"Yes. She's right here."

Your eyes eased up into alert as you met Bojack's, and he gave you a small smile, as much as he could manage, as his eyes turned to meet yours, tentative and sickly as he felt. He reached out an arm for you to walk to, though the gesture was small and hesitant, and you took to lightly stepping your way over to his embrace.

"What is it?" Your voice was light, questioning and gentle just as your eyes, softness easing into your expression as you turned up to meet his.

"I don't know. What I want is for you to go to bed." Bojack's eyes were somber, right along with the attempt of his low and reflective voice as he guided you by him. You were only a few inches separate from him now; enough for him to keep his hand covered behind the middle part of your back. His eyebrow raised up as he tilted his head to the side. "Eddie? What's your idea on where this is supposed to go?"

"Erika? That you?"

Eddie's voice as, evidently, was high pitched and friendly enough that it caused you to feel vaguely calmer and more soothingly humored in your air, your body being pulled in by Bojack's gentle ease of a touch as he gazed at you with soft uncertain inquiry while your hips hovered beside his.

"Now, if I know anything about the way that you feel, honey, it's that you're a wise and enduring woman. More than I've ever known. You didn't let the loneliness and the isolation get to you. The best way for loneliness to destroy you is to try and chase its solution. But you have a good head and heart on your shoulders, and you healed and endured your way through the sickness, rather than attempting to try and heal it by chasing its solution. Bojack could use that kind of woman, and god knows its been far too long for him to find one."

"Eddie, man, what is your deal here?" Bojack's eyes flared up into a glare as he turned his eyes down to the phone.

"Are the both of you nice, safe, clear headed?"

"Oh. Uhm-" Bojack's eyes turned as he looked over at you tentatively; you only gave him a light knot as you reached overhand and gently squeezed it up against his palm, and he was surprised at the insinuation that you gave him in the bold move of it. Your fingertips took to spreading beside his palm as you stayed not near his complete embrace-but certainly enough for it to be a statement that you were perfectly willing of wherever it was that he would decide to take it.

"Yeah, I guess." His eyes turned down to the phone as his voice was light and even toned in his nervousness as he spoke it, and there was a soft, low in content to chuckle that came from Eddie's end.

"Good, good. Keep her with you. Make sure that you keep her nice and even, the both of you. Just stay calm, in the moment, enjoying and staying with one another. This is the kind of moment in terms of the richness between the both of you that that couple is giving me that they couldn't even believe existed, and I myself the same. To have someone wise enough to get through the isolation of the traumatizing life that she did and not lose her mind, and for you to give her the stability of that of what she needs. It's like nothing else, just to be able to take it in. Now I'm not saying that this is going to cure the sickness for the both of you, but that's a journey that the both of you have to figure out and explore as your life goes on together. What's important is that you keep yourself patience and focused on one another, blessed and gentle."

"Okay." Bojack eyes were lowered as he kept his eyes down in that heavy and cursed thought-and this time his hands found that way beside the middle part of your back, though they only hovered, not daring to touch. He was surprised to just how refreshing and confirming the intimacy of being with you was; almost as if it was a physical force that felt like it was in agreement with his hands pressed up against the middle part of your back. Although he wasn't sure if he could believe in any good unless it had a tangible result, he couldn't deny the way that your body felt up against him as he gradually pulled yourself forward; as if it was a physical and bodily energy between the both of you and your understanding between one another and of what you were doing for one another within your chemistry.

His eyes turned to look you over with a soft grin, meeting up against what was almost his bashful eyes, and you gave him a slight nod as you met against his expression. There was a human weakness inside of your eyes that seemed as if you were doing everything you could have tried to find a balance with in regards to how it interacted with the tenderness between the both of you; not unlike a slightly more forgiving and wise healing from Bojack's turmoil-but nonetheless were you attempting to find the balance.

"And that ring that you put on her finger. Is that still nice and clear both of your own visions?"

"Yeah." Bojack's lowered and dry response to Eddie changed into a tentative, shy expression as he watched you lift your fingertip up to Bojack, and he hesitant acted upon his natural emotional instinct, teeth poking, as he threaded his fingers beside your palm and fingertips. "Right here."

"Keep yourself nice and calm. Remember, there's only so much that you can do to betray your own humanity, and we can't really deny it in its entirety, even as that's the source of our main fears when it comes to internal illness. That's a comfort to take in, and not something that you should be in denial or ne afraid of. All you can do is be aware of your nature and do the best you can. It's okay to fall fully into your truth, especially since our truth is going to force us to be a part of it regardless. All this bullshit when it comes to being human, all these measures and all this chaos-it all came from the core of the idea that this idiot species didn't allow itself to be alive for the sake of it. Now we gotta make our own way to understand it-and harmony with someone else is all there is."

"You speak from experience?" Bojack's voice was somber, inquisitive, with a vague edge of tease.

"I do. And believe me, if you can be like one of those rare few, like your wife, who can somehow be entirely alone and not suffering, more has to you. But a wise and a smart man knows not to test it. And besides, and I'll give you this, Bojack; you've suffered enough."

"I-appreciate the sentiment."

"Listen, Bojack, happiness is easy. Suffering isn't complicated as much as our brains convince us. It's just something as simple as stimulation to take away from this nonexistent thing we call perception in our minds, sometimes called illness, sometimes health-whatever. None of it is real. You can chose to be happy anyway, and universe knows I had to when I lost my wife and her blessings physically; but that dosen't matter. She just gave me the stimulation of the truth, and I followed her simplicity of what she showed me accordingly, and I follow her like a map ever since. Maybe there's a chance you can still find happiness on your own after a lifetime of isolation and trying to figure it out. But to find someone who gives you a clear map of the peaceful way through this crazy thing called existence; you better take that and run with it, BJ. And I mean that advice sincerely."

"I understand."

Bojack kept the phone huddled beside his cheek now, and without even realizing it were his shoulders and bodily disposition fully turned into himself into an odd sense of natural apology. His expression was still naturally apologetic as he turned his head and looked over you as you simply gave him another odd sense of permission again to do as he needed or wanted, your back even stepping back into the grasp of his hand until he felt the radiation and heat of your skin meet beside his palm.

Your bodies energy, heat and in all of its uncertain nervousness, stayed bonded beside his palm in what felt like a rhythmic sense of panic from his end and the admitted side of yours; though he could tell you were doing the best you could to simply guide Bojack through his meditation of trying to keep himself focused on where the conversation was heading.

"Now, I want you both to stay clear and focused on the scenario at hand, understand? That's what matters, and in making sure you don't lose one another and the clearest versions of yourself that helps you to truly feel one another. Whether tonight, tomorrow, or next week, thats what is at the core of everything."

"Eddie, what is this about?" Bojack snapped his eyes with a glare back over to Eddie. His eyes lowered ina further intense exasperation as he added "Because I know that if I don't get her to bed and if we don't get a little bit of good night's sleep, then we're really gonna be in trouble, because I'm not going to be able to talk about what to do tomorrow with her clearly- and I was hoping that I could get something at least a little bit worked out for her by then."

"You already do have it worked out, belly brain. Most people already have things worked out before they even realize that they do. That's the entire point of feeling frustrated and low energy is. We already have the answers just from existing. All you have to do is listen to it."

"Depression being the answer? Not in my experience."

"Must be why this conversation is going where it's going, then."

"I don't know if I would necessarily entirely agree with that but, I respect your belief in that. Or I would, if it made any useful context in this specific scenario. Which you seemed to be determined to make clear, it is not."

"All the both of you have to do is simply stay meditative in the moment. The both of you already have meaning as individuals, and I know it feels like a sickness, but the only reason why you feel sick is because you refuse to accept your current reality for what it is and is simply be within the moment and to be a part of it. Instead you're trying to fight it with these ideas of where you should go next or what you should do or how you should be or how you should dress up the moment and aren't accepting it simply for what it is. That's all that existence is, is accepting it for what it is, and right now, is the both of you coming into an acceptance of marriage. There's no right or wrong with life, unless you're dying; and if I've come to learn anything about my relationship with my wife, maybe not even then. We're just little stupid foolish things. We don't know anything, but we try to. It should be a comfort-but first we gotta allow it to be."

Bojaack rolled his eyes upward as he managed a sharp breath, fingertips coming beside his cheek as he scratched the side of his cheek for a moment in vague restlessness. His eyes turned upward as his expression was small and dilated in thought, and he gave up a slight breath as he rolled up his shoulders while he turned his heavy eyes up to the ceiling, if only to break from the intensity of your intimacy for a moment.

"Bojack, believe me, I've come to understand the heart of man. More than anything. And I know that all you need is to escape suffering. That's all you want. You don't need all these lavish concepts and directions that you've come up with for the last few decades of your life. You just need to reach for what gives you your humanity. Stop overcomplicating things. The answers have more than likely been in front of you this entire time, and never not now more than ever. You can think yourself into a heaven release and get yourself away from the grim of this world that has already spent its entire life trying to destroy you. But you have to allow it to happen first. Your wife is here. Let her be your wife. Let yourself know what that means for once. Let yourself learn. There isn't anything else to life than that."

Bojack felt a heaviness ease across his expression this time, and his head titled forward lightly. He didn't have a sharper protest this time; it felt too true to something indescribable in regards to what Eddie was saying, and there was an odd exhaustion that was meeting Bojack that was too thick in its demand for him to bothering fighting against anything other than the trail of focus that was following the front of his inner spiritual life, currently sickly and wretched in a way that felt out of his control, no matter how many times he had manipulated himself into thinking he could find peace.

He could see the decisions being made currently panning out in front of him on an emotional level; and he couldn't deny that what Eddie spoke resonated with him; the indenability of the need to find a relief amongst the emptiness of existence guaranteed to drive him insane otherwise. Bojack had suffered and had denied himself enough within his existence that he had come to realize that often there was very little, if any, forgiving acceptance of the way that his natural story seemed to be turning up in front of him that was greater than himself in its sickness if it continued to go on as it had; as much as Bojack had always tried to live with the easy way out, and had tried to convince himself he would find his peace regardless of the path he took, there seemed to be an emotional thread of understanding that there was some force above it that was greater than anything he could ever control. Predestined, in a sense, and with a gumtree of inner suffering if he didn't follow a certain rule of action.

It was horrifying to feel, and far from easy to accept, but it still had been as it was, and the stagance of that truth had caused something that was the more uneven form of peace. His eyes were full of that conflcit of emotion as he turned his expression back to you, and as you turned your expression to meet his tentative wet ones, you couldn't deny there was a natural sense of guidance and sense of how you looked and the instilled peace of how it made him feel. Your eyes fluttered up and gave him a natural sense of peace just to even meet up against your eyes, a natural and forgiving clarity. Your body stepped back further until the middle part of your back was more than just grazed by Bojac's palm, and he allowed his palm to ease beside the middle part of your back as he felt your skin peak out through the fabric, the curve of your body leaning beside Bojack. He adjusted as he turned his attention back to the phone, though there was a new sense of stagnant understanding of the lack of choice on a spiritual level.

"I just want what Bojack wants." Your eyes raised up as you turned your expression up to eyes Bojack's eyes as he turned his expression over to you with a soft wince of his defiant and intense expression. His expression became empty in meditative thought as he turned his eyes away into a vague denial for a moment, emotion distant and clearly on the extent of being overwhelmed; and then taking to shaking his head lightly.

"Understandable. Although far from trustworthy."

Bojack's eyes become momentarily more present as he snapped his focus back over to Eddue, teeth poke out lightly.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"You've been all over the place, big man. And it's ok. I'm just saying I've seen the chaos of your soul for what it is. I want the woman to have her choice. I want her to feel as if she can decide upfront without guilt of self doubt or anything similar."

"Yeah." Bojack's voice was low, tentative as the muscles on his expression tensed for a moment; clearly still on the brink of conflict both with himself and with here he should have exerted that energy to. "I agree." His eyes turned to you lightly, and you flicked your eyes up to meet Bojack's. Though his emotion was still bewildered, his eyes were earnest."I want that, too."

"At the end of the day, he's the one that had the power to come up with these kinds of things to begin with. In regards to where they go. He's the one that made up everything that he did; the solar system of my small refugee, this relief. It's ultimately up to him where he wants to take this." Your eyes kept on Bojack's as he gazed at you with his aged and conflicted eyes, and yours in an attempt to be gentle and guiding in the wake of his wreckage. A soft relief, a smile in your tone as you added without turning from Bojack's eyes as he gazed at you with a tentative conflicted layered emotion; "I'll take it wherever I can get it, in terms of relief I'll figure it out, I always have."

"You do need to stop coming up with a plan." Eddie's voice was trailing into a matter of fact tone, and Bojack shook his head lightly as he turned his head back to the phone. "Just know that you're not alone in the chaos, no matter what happens. Maybe you can't see it now, but you're all connected into this expanse chaos going on in human life."

Bojack's eyelids lowered dryly. "No kidding."

"You already have one plan that's right here, taking itself naturally according to your emotions, as the way that it is with meeting one another. Most worthwhile plans are already inside of us, even if it might feel like the most horrifying thing. We're naturally drawn over towards meeting our energy due to the fact that we naturally need to find it- there's really no other choice, if you understand me. Not what it comes to the way that we're wired. You'll destroy yourselves otherwise. And the both of you are incredibly lucky to simply have it right here and to have your longing for one another so deeply embedded in one another that it is quite literally demanding to be felt. The two of you have no choice but to go towards truth. Now all you have to do is to go forward and to accept the clear road that is being paved for the both of you. The world might be crumbling, but that certainly dosen't mean either of you have to. All you have to do is follow what feels full, right, true. That's all there is. Can I get the both of you do that?"

"Eddie, I don't know what you're asking." Bojack's voice hitched up into an extension to protest, and you threaded your hands beside his as your fingertips squeezed beside the spaces of his hands lightly. His eyes turned as he looked you over with his soft and aged ones as he felt the soft attempt of reassurance from your end. "I gave her the ring, she has it on her finger. Even if I was open to the idea of marrying her, I wouldn't be interested in doing it legally."

"And why not?"

"Why..not?" Bojack's eyes snapped up to yours as he saw the gentle emotion in your eyes of bittersweetness, Bojack wincing as he met the narrative of your eyes. "Because it's too big of a deal, Eddie. That's why." His eyes kept darting over to yours, as if guiding you through the conversation. "Neither of us need that kind of stress."

Eddie gave a soft chuckle, and the two of you could hear the genuine contentment that was within it. Bojack could feel that his own wreckage where there had previously been deniability was gradually turning into a soft song for exhaustion, and even further, a sensation of acceptance, in contrast to the soft ease of acceptance that made up the wisdom of Eddie on the other side of the phone in contrast.

"Just marry her."

"No!" Bojack's eyes darted to you in the wreckage of his eyes. You only gave him a soft reciprocation of acceptance; wreckaged and sickly, but accepting. His eyes kept on your pitiably as he gave you a wretched somber gaze, then turned the pity of his expression back to the phone."I don't think either of us-"

"Do it right now, or make plans to marry each other, at the very least. There's nowhere else for either if you can go in the future. This is it; and your end is far more forgiving than most. Even if you don't believe anything about what the couple said or anything about what I believe, I know that the both of you are human enough that you can't deny that simplicity that you're feeling being compelled. Life is empty and stagnant, but it's in that emptiness and stagnance that we have the sanity to find where we're meant to go to find something a little bit more meaningful and to find ourselves if we can. It all works in a circle and in time, and we don't understand it, and we can't control it. We don't need to. All we can do is follow it. Marry her, right now. please, Bojack."

"I get that. But-"

"I know you can. I know you have it in you to find that natural instinct positivity if you allow yourself to. but you have to be willing to go after it. To trust it. That's all there is. Anyone can start to follow the bad egg routine of life of deciding to rob themselves and to go after constant negativity and to deny themselves anything. The goal is to see that it dosen't have to be that way; that healing comes in realizing everything is about perception and what you want to be true. If you only lean into the idea of bad, then you'll go after bad. People don't end up with miserable fates and lives because of what happens to them. It's what they believe to be true after. Nothing is real outside of the human mind, and that especially is true when it comes to the mind of your own. You can suffocate this feeling and this gift your wife is giving you-the rich inner narrative of life and entire world it is promising you-or you can take it and accept it in full. But I am telling you now, where this is all going, there isn't going to be much forgiveness if you rob yourself, and it may be far more painful than you could ever imagine."

"And you know that-how?"

"I know a lot more than you'll ever bother to understand yourself. Even though its just as accessible to you. But just as you are now, you're cutting yourself off from that. And I think you're more than aware of how that feels. So what do you want to do next?"

"I-ah." Bojack's eyes darted in conflict, and his pupils were small and panicked; his eyes darted down to your expression, and you only turned your eyes up to met his while giving a gentle nod. His ears flew back, his expression wincing as he turned back to the phone. He felt the pressure of your fingertips easing beside the spaces of his hand, and there was a small wordless confirmation towards his fear, and clarity came to him just from the form of feeling your fingertips ease beside his in soft encouragement. He gave a soft and somber tilt of his head as he muttered, "I do."

He felt the intense uncomfortability as the confession left his lips, but he couldn't deny that he did, to some extent, believe that he meant it in its entirety. He gave a slight heavy reset of a breath as he turned his eyes up into a vague distance as he felt the smallest confirmation of his bravery as your eyes turned and kept beside his disposition firmly, fingertips threaded up against his as you continued in gentle encouragement.

A soft hitch of his breath left his mouth as he allowed the tender unknowing to reflect beside his eyes as he kept his eyes turned up in front of him in a detached distance; it took him a moment, but he turned his layered and timid eyes over to yours, and his expression was aged and layered in an emotionally humble pathetic vulnerability-but he took to turning his eyes to meet yours as he felt the silver ring of your finger ease beside his hand as a wordless sign of your encouragement. His met up against your inquiring ones, teeth poked as he gave a soft breath and a hitch as he looked you over and met your eyes as a felt a certain resounding decision being molding in front of him with perfect certainty trying to measure in any way that he could whether or not you agreed along with his sudden extension of the depth of his conflicted words.

"Yes." His voice somberly said it with more confidence now, and his eyes turned to you with more diction and emotional confidence now; there was far less wavering in his voice as he turned his stout body a few inches towards yourself. "Yes, I do."

He gave a soft breath as he looked you over, and he could see that, although attempted to be hidden for the sake of what you deemed his own comfort, there was a soft relief against your eyes-and that was all that he needed to know that you, without a doubt, agreed with him on every level of which could have existed; so much to the point that it gently broke out and through the clear tightrope of which you were used to walking that usually polluted your expression.

"I'm willing as much as I ever will be, anyway." His words were far more even toned now, accepting, and with a soft balance of intention no as he simply allowed the tone to speak for itself. He didn't take his eyes off you once as you kept your focus on his with your own alert and guide of your own thoughts, still marred and hidden in your idea of what would be respectful to him as you met your eyes up against his own, the soft caress of the silver ring keeping beside his fingertips as a gentle reminder as the cold cheap layer of it played beside his skin; a soft dreamy tint of a reminder.

His ears lowered, his teeth poked as he looked you over to try and discern whether or not you were on the same journey as him emotionally; aged eyes kept winced as he didn't take the questioning of his eyes off of yours, and all you gave him was the slightest raise of your lip that gently met beside the warmth of your eyes, and though silent, there was all Bojack was searching for in his timid hesitancy, though not quite enough to make him go forward with full confidence.

Eddie softly cackled, his voice threading from his carefree wise amusement that was coming from the other side of the phone. More than anything else did it seem if it was a soft release from Eddie in regards to to intensity of hs request; Bojack's eyes were hooded and lowered as he turned his head back to the phone, though his eyes never stopped from darting over to look and meet yours; a journey of an open guide to another life. "Does that answer your question? Or, rather, questions that you wouldn't let go?"

"And what about you, sweetheart?" Eddie's voice still somber and quietly amused as he directed his tone of voice over in your direction. Bojack's eyes widened in a potable and sudden panicked fashion, though his teeth kept poked and showed off his humble wreckage even through his natural romantic grace."Do you think that you're ready to try to get dedicate yourself to this complete wreckage of a mess?"

"Hey, Eddie, thanks. You can stop now." Bojack stepped forward as he raised out a hand to press on the button of the phone; your slender hand reached out and threaded beside his palms, and he turned as he looked at you with a soft raise of his brow.

"It's ok. It's not a bad thing to be full of flaws and broken mess and wreckage of life experience and illness and ache of depression, Bojack. That only leaves further window and room for you to be entirely known in a full human way that can't exist without that."

"Yeah, well, you made your point, so-" Bojack's hands threaded ou from your palm as he looked at you with a soft question as he felt your pale hands take away from the hang up button. His eyes lowered down as he felt your hands dance beside his, and with a soft reset of his eyes turned upward did he gave a breath as he stepped away from the phone-and even more notably did your fingertips thread beside his as he felt the silver ring ease beside his fingertips.

'The entire point is that you both found one another-that you've been empty and corrupt beyond understanding or comprehension. Ceritnely of will; but that's the thing. There's an endurance there, a passion and humanity beyond what should exist that even I can't believe when you se the unrelenting black nature of people. Bojack is a wreck, sweetheart; a trainwreck beyond what will ever be perfect or for some even human, and there's a lot even more than that and far worse. But I know that he's the perfect kind of wreckage that would be able to fill up the void in the emptiness of your own life where previously it was lacking and nothing but survival that put those empty eyes and hands to robotic action daily just to survive. Both of you and your lives has been one long ongoing lesson of day to day struggle and ache, as is with most; but now the both of you can find the enlightenment that comes along with the twisted release and richness of that essence, if the both of you will allow. The indefinable sickness craves a deep and intimate understanding, and nothing feels better than acquiring it where there should be no hope at all. Even perfection. Do you want to dedicate the rest of your life to him, and entangle yourself into that bittersweet rich beauty? True connection carries you daily; it even goes away, and it carries you into every sickly dark, and years later, when people started at the same line and tripped, fell, and exhausted themselves less than half between what your soulmate gave you, you'll see the richness of what that means. I've never felt so at peace with what is, have never so easily been so amused at the chaos of the world, have never been as reassured as much as I have been since I found my reason and followed that reason. I'm in tune with what is going on well enough with because of my wife and the blessings that she gave me for while she was here to bless me for a short time; and for an eternity afterward. I understand beyond a shadow of a doubt about what this could do for the both of you, and I can promise you that this is the best in the world's worthwhile human move that you could ever make. I know it's terrifying and uncertain, and I know that he's a piece of work- but believe me, I wouldn't try to recommend something as enduring and uncertain as much as you are unless I truly felt like everything was eternal and promised-and I know and read those trails in the inner eye of human psychology more than anyone. Go ahead, sweetheart. I promise you it'll give you at least a little bit of clarity to start with the real decision. The world is void and empty and it makes you sick. The two of you are a warm home; I understand it more than anything."

"Of course I want to."

You spoke it with a sense confidence ease without hesitancy so much to the point that it caused Bojack to snap his head over to you with genuine surprise, ears perked up sharply; as if there was a fog of negative deniability and of loathing inside of his energy previously that was now being pulled out of and replaced with the suggestion of your desire.

"Really?"

Bojack's voice hitched up as he looked over you softly, eyes now alert and aware as he looked you over this time with a staggering sense of shock that would have acknowledged an inner boy inside of him that couldn't believe the reciprocation. The further raise of your lip was effortless, and the action met your eyes as you gave him the soft nod, your fingertips and the trail of the metal beside the back of Bojack's hand increasing in its gentle ease beside his skin.

"I meant it when I said I wanted to. I still do."

"But-" Bojack cut himself off with a soft hitch of a breath, worried eyes turning down as he did so. "-You barely even know me."

"For more times in my life that I could even bother to remember, I've had a feeling of being on an empty trail that seemed as if it led to either sickness or despair; both inside and outside. And for all of those times I allowed myself to follow faith, to keep going forward and to take to trusting my natural instinct, or that something outside of me would someone come to a sense of humanity deprived my entire life, there was always something more human that was demanding me to follow it. It felt detrimental that I did; it was eternal, guinding, and almost a hollowing and naturally tragic feeling." Your eyes blinked lightly as you turned your head to where the phone was emitting the grace and ease from Eddie's end of the crickets and rustle of the cabin trees.

"Being here, being with you and everything you are in your humble grace-it's brought me the most precious thing. It's reminded me who I am- it's reminded me of that loving, simple, humble and emotionally rich and gentle grace that I've always wanted to be. I've been in the greatest despair, feeling as if I am nothing at all and as if I didn't even know myself even to myself and even if I had, the world would have just taken away the world from me anyway with its apathy and with its abuse of using name of seeing me as just another sack of skin and bones on the side of the street, forgotten and as worthless as they came. But I wouldn't have been able to grieve, I wouldn't have been able to long for you. I wouldn't be able to recognize it now, had I not had a soul to suffer from not being seen in the first place. And here-here, I feel like if I am not suffering. I now know that I need to follow that instinct telling me to go to to what is beyond my understanding."

Your eyes blinked softly, quickly as you turned your expression back over towards Bojack, and his own tentative eyes met yours; and it never had he ever felt as if he was worthy of something that was so full of human depth as much as he did the painful dedication of meeting yours; rather than the superficial structure of the personalities that had been surrounding him for a decade of his life now, so much to the point that it had become all he had been himself or had known in his existence-until he saw the endless protrude of new found life that was inside of your eyes as you met his now.

He could tell that you were meeting his in earnest in the same capacity in your eyes, to see the complete endlessness that came along with human value in life and of love, rather than the suffocation of having to mold himself to writing, acting, or expressing himself in a certain kind of way to indulge and appease what was at the core of people's critique, especially in regards to entertainment, their failure at being able entertain to their own neurotic boredom and restlessness with existence-and their critique of the creative who made art only to appease their own neurotic boredom and failure with making peace with existence; and, coming from the core of an energy that was inherently negative within the cure of human psychology and its natural cynical attitude from being deprived from something the earth could not give humanity, they would attack the other person that came from the same frustration extended into self-expression for both of their appeasement towards genuine suffering of the emptiness, and, as anything that came from the core of boredom or something negative did, as most things did with being human, they would weapinize the nagtvity against each other with thor angry restlessness, and destroying each other further.

"I understand, more than anything now, that there is not a single second of your life that you should waste doing anything that is not real to you in the present moment. That's all that life is; it's just following whatever it is that your truth is in the moment and living according to that no matter what it is- anything else will just lead to fogginess or a detachment with identity or a lack of understanding of who you currently are in the threat of life. I no longer have any interest in doing anything other than what I feel and believe and what comes naturally, no matter what people might be telling me in regards to who I am or what I should do or what is worth something on the outside-"

Your eyes turned down as your fingertips threaded up against the back of Bojack's chubby palms as his eyes watched yours; his expression humbly and adorably inserted with his teeth poked in that nervous fashion as he felt the gentle touch and thread of your fingers beside his.

"For the past couple of months I've been like a child again. Partially because I realized that I no longer felt that cage of value of life in the way people do, and that I no longer fear death, but rather see it as an interconnected game of one way or the other that I would be content if either happened, and grateful either way; acceptance of what is and gratitude is the only way to joy, and even just through that acceptance did I feel some joy for a time. Ironically, I had never felt happier or more content than when I accepted in full the inevitability of death, of being worthless, of being nothing, and to allow that path to lead me to wherever it was meant to lead me. There's nothing to be feared in any path of existence except for resistance the fate in and of itself, which is the part that causes us pain. So I let go entirely. Existence or a death, no matter where I went-there was no choice but to have an acceptance of either one, like a carefree freedom of purity that simply went along with whatever happened-which really is the only soulful and genuinely true feeling that feels things as they should be once we let go of the toxic narrative of having control or even understanding. I became humble, at ease. I simply began to follow what was above me that wanted me to follow it and teach me every day, and I trusted and I went and I sat and I survived in the ways that I needed, and with the way that things turned out, I would say that it was the most wise thing that I've come up with yet-or ever will. It may be the greatest reward that I could ever hope to be able to get. I never have never felt as much as present as much as being here with you now, of knowing you and feeling seen by you with what you've done for me for these past few weeks."

Eddie chuckled softly. Bojack's eyelids, hooded and tired, exasperated and graceful, turned as he looked up to where Eddie's voice emitted from his amusement; gentle and soulful this time.

"Then that means that we're on the same path, sweetheart. And that's not a bad thing to be on. Not one bit."

Your eyes blinked lightly as you looked over Bojack's eyes, detached and thoughtful in their meditative thought as he stared at the phone for a long while; and his head turned as he twisted his eyes over towards you even as his head kept intendedly turned over towards the phone for a avoidable moment, giving off soft and clumsy breath so he did so as he turned his eyes over towards a phone and then darted them back towards you several times in his humble and clumsy fashion. It was endearing and bumbled, breaking up over through that natural intelligent grace that he had far more than most-and you found that you loved and adored both sides just as deeply as you turn your head down for a moment, amused as you gently squeezed your hands up against his. You turned your eyes up to meet his as you turned your eyes to his in that soft thermal question as his own dilated and timid eyes finally found their way to your gentleness, and though the fear didn't leave his expression, he allowed his soft and timid expression to fall into a rhythm with yours. Your palm came to caress beside his cheek, and after what seemed like subconscious unknowing, did Bojack allow the curve of his soft bloated cheek to rest beside the curve of your hand; lightly, but with a pointed want.

"Now you're starting to talk the same way that I did when I began to feel the truth from my wife as well."

Eddie's voice came up soft, gentle and with his own contentment, and Bojack's teeth poked further as the conflicted fear didn't leave his expression; but he was now too occupied with feeling a simple natural purity of your pale hands, as wretched and as skinny and as much as they were a reflection of the nothingness of what you had been within life and the way that it had destroyed you in many ways, and yet he had never felt something that felt as if it was so full of a refreshment that was raw and soulful; a life thread of experience that seemed as if, in its tragedy, it had forced itself away from the grit of life that would have only just made the world sick and had made him sick as well; somehow, the world's punishment of rejecting you had only lead to an ironic reward for yourself; since the world was so sick, in its arrogance of attempting to reject you, it had only showed you that separation from the luxury of the culture Bojack was allowed to indulge in was a gift; and slowly had your mind cleared as you had found the raw way of life that the sick age of the modern world constantly distracted itself from.

The way that there was a certain raw life to you as much of the healed nature of Eddie was- resoundingly pure within existence, and something of what Bojack had stolen from himself throughout the years of his life whether he had meant to or not; and somehow, with you being pushed to the absolute bottom of the earth and rejected from the corrupted and sick world with its incapability of seeing how much it had made itself sick itself,, did it feel as if the most pure and blessed thing that he had never known as he felt your cold and wretched hands beside his.

"All you need is each other. I'll tell you that much. Very simple lesson." Eddie's voice spoke abruptly and unpromoted. Bojack's expression tensed at the hearing of Eddie's insistence; though it was somber and spiritually accepting now, and his eyes didn't leave yours once in the quality of their concentration.

"Is it?"

"Life is very simple like that. Now I know that you wanted to distract yourself with all these lavish ideas of consumption and alcohol and fame and projects and ideas and maybe even friendships -but at the end of the day, it's all very simple, almost tragically, to a degree, depending on how you look at it, or it can be so simple that you wake up every day and simply go in rhythm around within life in its most natural kind of fashion that could ever exist. Life is so simple that people have to fight how simple it is, it's resoundingly almost humorous and romantic at the same time, and I firmly believe that my wife would have taken care of me me in whatever kind of subconscious way that she could if she couldn't have found me. And even that would have been better than a lot of wretched souls out there who are in such denial that they don't even know how to see how miserable they are to begin with! all you need is to let go- that's all that you've ever needed, and most especially now. Put on the ring firmly, with intention, kneel down beside her, and allow yourself to make a promise with one another. The world has robbed itself of so much; but that dosen't mean that the both of you have to."

"What is that going to do? Even if we do go...through with it."

Bojack's eyes flickered over towards you as he spoke it, and it was clear he was allowing the entire conversation to be done step by step, constantly in the wake of making sure you were in comfort of following. for the most part was his staff body firmly facing yours as his eyes looked up against you with the soft question of his own eyes as he looked up against the side of your own expression.

"I think you've already know. And I don't think that it especially matters, either. What matters is that it does happen. That's all there is."

Bojack's eyes winced in a question as he listened to the sounds of Eddie on the other side of the phone. The sound of grass whispering beside the movement of his ankles were demanding in their soft whispered sensations on the other side of the phone. It was clear Eddie was walking through a greasy field, isolated, alone, and in the middle of the night; and there had never been anything that seemed so extended into a natural form of peace.

Bojack's eyes perked as his ears flicked up in timid question, though his fingertips and the spaces of them kept gently intertwined beside yours; and for the first time did companionship and peace of mind feel like a real and tangible thing. There was a sense of detrimental danger in regards to even just the soft sensation of Bojack obtaining something in his life that was truly worth losing; and yet, somehow, the feeling of having something worthwhile and meaningful to lose felt more like a refreshing gift more than anything he had ever felt when he had kept himself into a ease of worthless hidden emptiness of the stangance of life.

He would never be happy; he knew that much; the prime of his life for doing so had passed. But he couldn't deny that he did feel like there was a forgiving and small opening to something resoundingly forgiving and human; the most carefree purity of existence that he had lost as a child, the peace that he had only caught a glimpse of, if even that, before it had left his vision beyond understanding and certainly beyond being able to redeem it.

Bojack raised a brow as he looked over the phone. "Where are you?"

"Out walking. I've been out walking all day."

Bojack blinked lightly, turning to you, guiding you to follow him in his journey of coming to the conclusion the both of you felt was around the corner.

"All day?"

Gentle amusement was in Eddie's voice as he spoke; "That's right."

"Why?"

"Every day of my life is about just spending the time for while I have it left. Enjoying it without guilt. I'm not playing into this idea all of you city folk have about worth and indulgence of ideas that only makes you sick. And anyway, once you realize how soulless and spiritless people are, especially the successful ones that people praise a worthy that are just the rich version of the aimless, you start to come to peace with solituide. Genuine, true peace. There was never anything to be except for the wisdom I acquired and shared with my wife. There's nothing left except for life to pass through him, to detach myself from that sick and tormented world; and its never felt so good. I imagine that the simpler creatures and the purer creatures of this world feel the way I do."

"Doesn't it get-lonely?"

"I ache sometimes. I worry sometimes, of course I do. The difference is that I don't indulgence and act on the pain. I don't blame myself for it. I don't ruin myself over it. I just myself and things be as they are, no matter what. The only thing that ever mattered was finding peace with the fact that I existed, in and of itself, and that this journey was going somewhere that I would never understand; and that was the entire point. My wife was the warm bonding and the essence of everything that can't be earned or understood; just gifted. I got my gift. Not I'm just as one and as pure as anything until I'm taken and joining the incomprehensible. And I've never felt more like an innocent. I don't mind what happens; my existence has no ego or pride. I imagine it would be impossible-or maybe even what your folk considers trauma-to have to undo and entire lifetime of poison of narratives that superficial people that they molded their entire life over. It did feel strange, and I was only a worker in a city. It might be even harder for you, Bojack; but you've bene gifted. And now all you have to do is fall into that profound and incomprehensible gift that can't be earned of sharing in someone's experience and being in rhythm with the long journey of life and being in full bonding and intimacy with one another. Enjoy it-once its done, there's only the wisdom left after."

Bojack turned his eyes down as his fingertips began to thread and caress beside the silver ring in a subconscious bonding beside your hands. He turned his stout body over to you now entirely; a little bit of sickly hesitance as he did so, but he turned as he raised both of his chubby hands and cradled them beside the pale hands of your own as he raised them beside his chest, eyes humble in their uncertainty as ears kept lowered while his palms cradled your own. He gazed at you with that humble and uncertain pain in his eyes; but there was a confidence in your own expression that he couldn't deny or turn away from as he kept his hands threaded beside your palms, his thumb resting beside the silver ring of your finger.

He sighed as he reset his breath softly, rolling his shoulders as he turned his tentative eyes to where your pale and worn hands were poking beside his fingertips as he gazed down at the intertwining with a profound sense of internal conflict that could only come from a tender heart. Your eyes kept focused on his as you trailed beside his softness in his eyes, clumsy and full of doubt in a way of someone who only felt and suffered deploy managed; his fingertips threaded beside your palm as he kept his fingertip threading beside the cold silver ring that was barely a decent fit in your fingertip, bony and wretched from the wear of time.

"Look, I can tell the both of you have had your time to come to your conclusion. I will say that the two of you will be in a lot of pain moving forward with all of this-there's nothing more painful than being or having something pure in a world like this. That's why I've chosen isolation now that I've seen this species for what it is now that my own purity of a person has left me. But you don't need to worry. Just don't punish yourself for the lost and the impure in this world-you were given the gift of the intimacy and bonding of one another. I know you already had a pure heart just by knowing you, Bojack-it's torn and wretched under layered and conflicted action, but I knew that you did, because you were wretched and conflicted. I would like to believe that all people are equal and that talent and soul isn't a thing as much as simply training people to have it with kindness; but I do know that the most impossible thing is to teach someone how to have that purity that makes someone more wretched in a world like this where all you can be is sinful."

"I may have gathered the general idea of that somewhere along the way." Bojack's eyes were empty and lowered, earnest in his somber tone. "I think the best way I went about it was accepting the pain and the constant berating of people and the emptiness and just trained myself daily to accept it, more than anything. It was either that or to go off of the rails-and I did that, too." His thoughtful eyes turned up to meet yours; and you gave him a small raise of your lip as the welcome gentle ease of your eyes looked into his own, your pale fingertips tapping beside his hand in a soft guiding. "But that was never the answer, either."

"Listen, Bojack, I do know that if you feel an injustice inside of yourself, it means that something unjustified occurred that shouldn't be. That the world robbed you or took away from you something inside of you that knows it should have gotten more. We know what's justified and what's not, believe me. Even when it comes to ourselves. If we know we don't deserve something, we don't throw pity on ourselves for not having it; we know it makes sense. I can't sing a high note, so I don't torment myself over that. But tell me, Bojack, do you feel like you were meant to go your entire life without companionship? A wife?"

"Eddie-" Bojack's eyes turned to the phone, eyes darted into a soft light of a insulted fight as he looked over it, ears lowered. "I would appreciate it if my-if we could take it from here, ok?"

"Of course. Of course. I don't need to be here for this if you don't want me to be- but you have to promise me you are going to do this and that you're going to go ahead with the spiritually enough that you can feel the difference of the confirmation of it. It's about more than the two of you-if you're generous, you'll ket other people who want bear witness. Believe me."

Bojack's eyes snapped to the phone. "Who would be so concerned about something like this? That creepy couple jamming their fingers into people's business?"

"Call me whenever."

"Wait, Eddie, I'd like to talk about wh-"

The sound of the crickets cut off, right along with that natural rhythm of peace that came from Eddie's end that had been full with a notable sense of life in and of itself that seemed to add a peace that came to the unknowing of chaos of life and the reclusive of people's thought. Bojack had stepped his way forward to try and get Eddie to talk; but the sound of the other end of his atmosphere disappeared, and Bojack gave a soft roll of his shoulders as his eyelids lowered at hearing the now silent sound that came from the iPhone. Nothing surrounded the area now except for the sound of the buzzing of the pool outside and the distant constant chaos of the life and buzzing of Los Angeles. Bojack's eyes turned up, dilated and empty in a sudden reclusive of panic; but he closed his eyes as he took a light breath and turned his attention back to your hands and his that were encircled beside your palm.

"I want to take this out to the porch." Bojack's voice was wobbling with a slight unknowing and his timid uneven uncertainty, and he refused to meet your eyes, although the somber and natural grace in his reflection in his expression didn't lessen. A soft shrug left accompanied his words as he added; "I think that would work better for the both of us, anyway. Get some fresh air while we-talk."

His uncertain, innocent gleam of his eyes turned up in an attempt to meet yours as he gave you a small raise of his lip as he looked up at you with an attempt of tender confidence. There was a certain kind of confirmation of a light of agreement that dissuaded away from suffering in yours as you met his with a light raise of your lips; and a greater softness came into Bojack's air at your permission and confidence that swept away any unnecessary narrative of suffering where there only needed to be freedom, humble nature, and light between the both of you, and for now, in this quiet moment of beng seen, did Bojack agree with it. The warmth and richness of that intimate specific story and life in your eyes swept through Bojack's as you gazed the slender and wobbly bony fingertip of your own against his skin in silent agreement, and with a soft and wordless intimacy did your hands squeeze beside his skin.

"We don't have to have a wedding."

Bojack's expression become vaguely more alert at the blunt proposition of the wordless narrative that the two of you had come into agreement with without even meaning to in regards to the ceremony of your agreement within the intertwining of your futures.

"Oh." Bojack's eyes dilated in front of him in quick thought; he then raised his eyes to yours and gave a quick nod, and that tentative smile eased on his lips again. "Yeah. Sure. I mean-is that something that you would be ok with, if that was the case?"

Your head indicated to the door without taking your eyes off of Bojack. "Do you want some air?"

Bojack chuckled, humor of relief easing across his features as he turned his eyes down in gentle thought.

"More than you know."

Your hand stayed on his, the one still with the silver ring on your finger as he guided Bojack back out to the open glass doors, the spotted and busy crowdedness of the buildings of the city reflecting over the rail as it always did with something that seemed profoundly surreal in the reflection of the beauty of the busyness of the compact nature of human life. Bojack's expression was worn and tired, and the age and wrinkle of his features were protruding further and showing off how much age had marked him-but he gave you a small contentment of his lip that suggested a genuine sense of peace as he allowed his body to be moved forward to the window.

"I don't have an opinion on anyone being aware of our marriage."

"No?" Bojack's eyes tilted to you in question as he raised his hand beside the sliding door, turning it back along with the push of the curtains as he stepped his way out. He turned as he kept one hand intertwined in yours as he helped you out, you speaking slightly in gratitude as you stepped your way out through the sliding doors again as you turned your eyes up and met his while he gave you that worn expression of his smile. Though your disposition and air was one of someone who was tired, disassociated, and ill themselves, as you stumbled your way out of the door, Bojack gave a soft and considerate rasp as his other hand came to help you forward, both hands now squeezing yours as he finished helping you out to the porch.

"It's your life. You're marrying a void, as far as I see it."

Bojack's eyes lowered in distant thought, his palm still firmly threaded within yours as you other hand guided beside the middle part of his back while you helped him walk across the pool and over to the edge of the rail. Bojack took to rubbing the back of his neck, fingertips threading through his mane as worn eyes turned down.

"Yeah, I'm not so sure about the marriage thing. It's easy to agree with someone when you're just trying to get someone off of a phone call, but, ah-"

He gave a small shrug as he gestured his other hand upward while he kept his eyes distant and lowered down. He continued to walk you across the balcony until he was a few inches away from the rail, his eyes turning as he gazed at you tentatively to try and measure your reaction. There was a full confidence that in your eyes was now beginning to lesson as you kept yourself guided by his hip, and he knew his taking away from the promise had been part of the new emptiness. He turned vulnerable eyes upward as he gave a heavy quick restart of a breath, scratching beside his neck tentatively.

"Eddie could come over, if he wanted. If you wanted to do something similar to a wedding ceremony." Bojack's eyes flicked as he tried to measure your every emotion to his words; but your eyes only kept away from his, right along with the narrative of you emotion that he both understood and was terrified of at the same time in regards to where he was destroying you without meaning to. "We could have him over, maybe he could invite over some of his..camp gang, if he wanted to, I could even drum up some annoying people from my past if it-"

"Bojack, do you want to get married or not?"

It was spoken with an intensity of confirmation that took Bojack aback at hearing the sudden edge to it. Your eyes blinked with intense rhythm as you turned your expression up to meet Bojack's; your eyes eased beside his eyes as he met yours with a tentative uncertain ease of his expression beside yours.

"I've been around, Bojack. I've been a lot of places in this town, city-country. I would rather take my things and head out, know who I am and what I do and don't have, than have this constant wonder of tugging and back and forth between the two of us. I want clarity."

Bojack's eyes took on what almost could have been defense as he looked between your eyes and saw the genuine condition within them.

"You're serious?"

"Yes."

His eyes darted down in quick thought, and the heat of defense gave a hint of a presence in his eyes as the muscles on his face tensed into a tentative consideration.

"Do you realize what that makes me feel like? You're like everyone else, then."

"What?"

"C'mon. You're acting like every other woman I'v never managed to be with." Bojack began to step back, his hands easing outside of the intimacy of your hands while he gave you a cautious glare. "If Bojack doesn't do this then you're not interested in your perfect molding of what you think I should be, is that it?"

'I need to make sure I can know what's going on."

"Yeah. As long as it goes at your pace and makes you comfortable, right?" Bojack's head was titled to the side, the wrinkles on his face deepening along with the glare in his eyes as he looked across your expression with a defensive challenge. Your eyes turned down even as you reached out to him, and something softened in your air as the energy of your face lessened.

"The way you've made me feel has been like nothing else. What you've done for me-the sense of home you've given me. Of place, belonging. You've given me something that I used to think could only be imagined to exist; the sense of following someone's emotional and life journey and seeing someone for everything they are. To feel a sense of surrerality, admiration-" Your eyes eased up to Bojack's as your expressed crossed his. "-And my favorite one, which is tenderness-"

"-No. " Bojack turned his body away from you entirely now. "Stop."

"The way it is with you is so specific and real in a way that I couldn't even imagine. And I know you feel it-and to stay here, to see you robbing and taking that away from the both of us isn't something I can stand. Maybe you don't realize it, but it affects you as much as it ever would be-and that's one of the reasons why i need to leave."

"And we have to get married over that?" Bojack's eyes turned as he met yours, teeth poked as he gazed at you with an ease of question in his uncertain expression. "Over the idea that you think you found someone who's worth it?"

"It's not an idea." You shook your head lightly, and he could see the strain on your face; the no doubt constant battlement of your day to day life that came with whatever separation of sickness the world hd put you through-and he felt an emotion both forgiving to himself in its sudden justified want of emotional vulnerability of the same purity of what you had shared overcome him as he felt the usual weight of his fight fall into a weight of an ease of acceptance for the energy between the both of you that was far and different.

Bojack's fingertips threaded away from your hands entirely and instead found their way by his chest. You spoke nothing as you allowed your silence to speak while you kept your eyes lowered and downward, and in the uncertainty did Bojack sense one thing that was familiar; his weighted and maddened guilt.

"Look, I-" He turned his eyes down and over to the rail, wincing as his fingertips threaded beside his mane. "I'm still on my own journey of trying to figure out whatever it is with the little I have left of my life-and that's not your fault."

Your eyes flooded up as you met Bojack's, and your pale skin looked even more eternal by the pool water as it traced beside your skin; and not for the countless time did Bojack feel something heavy drop inside of him in the observation of your personhood.

You readjusted your body as you rolled your shoulders in thought, and although it was clear you were somebody who was a little bit timid, whimpered and almost a vaguely pathetic within their helplessness, he couldn't deny that almost devastating connection towards that energy and air towards your existence-and never had he ever been so aware of his own small and finite existence until now, and the open and empty space of his failure to make a worthwhile life for himself that was now open and welcomed by your own presence. For all of his shortcomings about how he wanted to force himself to believe in the promise that there was no hope in what you were giving him, that it anther dead end to be rejected so that he could go back to the trails of his usual wretched company as the empty days of his life waned out, the comfort in the way you carried yourself and in the future that if he felt that you could promise him was more rich than he knew what to do with even just at the idea of it.

"And Thank God," Bojack added, with the edge of attempt of lightness to his voice in order to guide you back to his confidence and that tenderness he had come to memorize himself all too well as you turned your eyes up to meet his. He stepped forward, with the suggestion of his energy to want to take your hands again. "Thank God that I'm still trying to figure out who the hell I am or what I want and that I'm still looking for that clarity, and I couldn't be more grateful. If I hadn't I wouldn't have been introduced to you and what you've given me. I wouldn't even be aware of it. I wouldn't be able to even have the emptiness to be desperate enough to eevn look for it. That much I know. And with the way that this feels, as painful as it is, I'm so glad that I had that empty life so that I could meet this now. To even what to even entertain the idea of it. Because I know that even a few weeks ago, I never even would have come close to having that kind of patience." He paused as he looked over you earnest, expression innocent, voice somber and wise with age. "Now I do."

You nodded, though your eyes still kept away from his now; clearly he had turned you over into a narrative that you now felt the need to concern yourself with, your pale hands shaking while they trembled beside the rags around your body meant to be the dress Bojack had gifted you, now stretched, ripped, and torn from the nights he had made love to you in the middle of the night when natural and present nature was far more strong than the idea of performance and the strain of narrative of the way things should have been; when he had been drunken off of his liquids and had pressed his somber and rasped lips beside yours as he had gently cradled you out of the bed and had pressed plush hips beside your body as hand had curled beside your hips while you, still half drunken yourself, had allowed Bojack to make his intimate and impulsive pelaudre to you; pure and without ego, the one thing humanity robbed itself from time and time again, and Bojack was only now discovering the freedom away from his own species.

"Bojack, you don't have to lie to me about any of this. I get it. I get that this would be terrible for your image-anyone's, really. Even the man with no name. I'm the grit of humanity. I"m worthless. I can be alive-no one will stop me, not necessarily, but only because most people are too caught up concerning themselves with the worthwhile to even notice me. I'm tired, Bojack, and I don't care about my worth with this world anymore anyway; but I won't deny someone who still feels an inhreint attachment to all of it. Of course you would."

"I don't care about anything anymore. I don't care about my worth, being someone, relevance-any of it. All any of that ever did was just lead me to people just as equally flawed and screwed up who were trying to do the same thing for all the same empty reasons." Bojack's voice was somber

His tired and puffy eyes turned over to the ring that was placed beside the intermingling of your arms, glinting beside the neon light of the pool. He was far too caught up in his emotion that seemed as if it was physically thickening as he walked his way towards you so much to the point that it was almost a tangible physical sensation to notice that the blue fog that had accompanied the couple was beginning to increase again as he stepped his way tentatively towards you.

Your fingertip continued to thread besides the ring as Bojack stopped when he was only a few inches away from you, and he began to feel that wave of difference in regards to energy change even just to feel even the idea of his dedication towards you. It wasn't that he didn't feel his pain and that his problems as an individual had disappeared-but more so that they were bearable now, that they would have been given meeting; that he would never be alone in that they would haunt him for the rest of his life for as long as he had the company and trust of a genuine loved one-and though even he had gotten the few and far between sensation of that, it was nothing compared to the feeling of being by spouse; and something beyond. It felt naive and like a last resort of dignity and sanity of all kinds; and its promise was so pure that he couldn't have brought himself to mind for a moment; he was at the end of his time anyway, and the only decisions that were left were of the same carefree innocence of existence as one with a child would.

"I'll marry you." He said it somberly but with that grace that came along with his authentic words. Lately. Your eyes gleamed up into a slight of shock as your air took on someone far more alert while you raised up your eyes. Bojack gave a somber hitch of his breath as he raised out his stout fingers to guide beside your hand again tentivaley; his eyes snapped up to yours in question as the muscles on his snout grimaced nervously, and you gave a small nod and a soft word in your surprise.

His nervous fingertips gentle began to caress against the silver ring that sat on your pale fingertip-this time your head turned down to watch Bojack as you gave a light laugh of gentle welcome while Bojack offered you that gentle raise of his kindness while gentle eyes met yours as he gave you a small nod; encouraging you as much as he was able while the emotion on your face trembled while your eyes watched his thumb and finger rested beside the ring in the position of your disbelief.

"I've never come and done anything even remotely like this before, and frankly I never thought that I would. Especially at this time in my life."

His eyes kept lowered down as he allowed his fingertips to continue to thread and play with the ring, his hands lightly cradling it as he turned the cheap material over. Your eyes turned back up to Bojack's as he kept his eyes turned in gentle question, his other palm coming to cradle and rest beside your fingertips.

The red of your wretched eyes were drenched in disbelief as you met his lowered and heavy ones while he looked at the turning ring with a slight caution and a somber understanding of what he assumed would be a painful decision. But he took to a sigh of a restart of a breath as he turned his questioning eyes to meet yours, and though there was mainly inexperienced and worn fear in his eyes, there was also a sense of emotional understanding that when it came to what the both of you could do for one another, there was hardly a choice in regards to what would be the best for the both of you.

"Maybe we don't have to plan it. We can just come take it one day at a time for whatever it is that it feels like its right for us, and just see where it goes from there." Your words were quickly paced in your spiritual excitement, and Bojack's expression turned to a soft, almost playful gentleness as he turned his focus back to the ring.

"Like the way you're always telling me to whatever I ask you how you managed to survive for this long being in a world like this without completely losing your mind."

Through a blunt and tired but softened tender air that was executed only by the way he had been connected to you that had given him a relief towards his black cynicism, he had felt a weariness already; there was something wrong about the commitment to the idea of loving someone as deeply as he had come to love you.

But, in his case personally, the way of which he had come to be loved by you. Had he ever been loved, truly loved, before you? He couldn't remember, and at this point he was uncertain if he ever had, or if he would ever feel it again beyond the surface of the heavenly but specific bubble of which had been wrought to your experiences together.

You had felt detrimentally true in a human way that seemed worthwhile, but it hadn't done much to ease the dry toll of knowing how things went, both by a large nature of a general discontent with the array of the state of humanity and where everything led that only an emotionally intelligent person would notice, which Bojack was, to almost a tragic degree where it had chipped away at him over a period of time, to believe in much of anything.

He was content and dryily complacent in the way that he endeared himself to the state in a way that had saved him from what most weren't capable of-knowing enough to see things as they were rather than falling into some soppy hope of things as they weren't.

And yet, somehow, you had broken that wall, and the infantilized nature of something that was a rich, mature, spiritual connection had triggered the romanticism of him that led to a tormented challenge of something that would have been rendered unbearably stagnant otherwise, and comfortably so.

When Bojack had backed out for a numbered time when he had showed signs of easing himself back into his own ease of distant complaceny, you had simply asked him again; and though he had tried to busy himself with the pillows and the sheets for the night, what he referred to you as "helping you get to bed so we an stop having this conversation", you had asked firmly enough that he had realized he had no reason to not comply. But he had chosen jadedness.

"Good God. For the what-tenth time? And even that's being generous."

There had been a break on your face, and his black loathing came over him towards the way he so easily was able to annihilate the only thing in life that had ever felt true, raw, or real; and yet it was all he knew.

"Alright, you know what I mean-" He sighed, raising up his hands, and the patience wrought from love overcame his bluntness. His next words were placed in a slightly more tender patience. For once, tenderness had come with a sense of ease as it left his language.

"Honey, stop asking me to marry you. We both know why I won't. And you shouldn't keep pursuing it. My answer is my answer."

Your eyes had lifted up when you had asked the question; it had been in the quieter mornings of in the golden light of the bittersweet and emotionally laden morning that had only been lifted up into a light of a certain disquiet poetic quiet tenderness that was increased by the way the previous emptiness of it was now associated by the softened gentleness of your presence. It was met with soft, genuine tender questions of what he needed and how he needed it first thing in the morning-allured and complimented by the kisses of you against his skin.

"It's just getting annoying. Cute, but it's pointless, and I've told you I won't. And I know we should both just…drop it."

It had been about the fifteenth time you had asked, and even more than twice the time Bojack had backed out.

You had, as always, been resoundingly patient. You had pressed a quiet kiss against the side of his cheek as you had crossed the area to give him intimacy-gentle and considerate. His eyes had closed as he felt the closeneess of your kiss-that made him feel the gentle, ancient way you loved one another even further.

"You're always so good to me. You feel this almost determentailly smooth way we're taking care of one another?" His hand squeezed worse. "Let's keep it that way. I don't want to overcomplicate that."

Your lips grazed up against his cheek into an agreement; though there had been an increased sense of intimation in regards to your lack of letting it go. "Anything you need."

The sentence spoke of a slight bittersweet acceptance, but he could already tell no progress had been made. His ears lowered gently. He leaned forward and pressed his lips against your forehead.

"Marriage is good if you're wired for trauma, which I have long since accomplished to the point where I've gathered all of the rewards and medals. No need to keep running. At least we're not wasting both of our time."

You didn't laugh, though you affirmed his jadedness by leaning forward and pressing your lips against his cheek with a softened smirk of a fondness that you never had failed to give him, even as he could sense the pain it brought you. You kissed under the part of his eye, and he leaned into it, a gentle rhythm with the way you loved each other that came in soft inches and movements.

"You know it's profound how much you keep pushing this? Truly impressive." He caressed his fingers against your palm. "Remarkably persistent." Another unsuccessful awkward chuckle.

He felt a strange black overcome him when he saw the acceptance of some hardened truth in your eyes, met with a gentle patience that only came from a truthfully softened connection that only came from two people who had connected on a profound degree.

But, as always, the black that came from the knowledge of the disappointment of himself reminded him of why he felt so innately connected to you; that gentle, nuanced, unfailing patience.

"You know I won't be able to let this go."

A breath left his lips; somewhere between a sigh and a feel of acceptance. He cared about you enough to feel like he believed there was something worthwhile between the both of you-but not enough to commit to anything outside of the comfortable stagnant narrative of what he had used to protect himself.

"We like each other." He emphasized the word 'like', and though he wanted to speak a word of gentleness, he knew it was faulty in the grace he could execute it for the time being, though it had never felt like anything could come as naturally and as soothed as it did when he spoke to you with the words of endearment that, for once, seened as if they had their proper place. "Let's just enjoy that."

A leaning of your forehead against his cheek. "You know I can't stand the idea of not being fully yours."

His ears lowered. "To this day, that narrative sounds-" He rolled up his eyes in thought; the image was graceful, in his own natural way, and seemingly more curated the more you came to observe it.. "Questionable. Misconceived. And other tragic emotional states people fall into to give themselves a hope to believe in."

Your mouth raised into a smirk."You're a trip, darling. Especially with the way you tip toe around pain."

"I literally have heard that a million times, but never in a tender context. Thank you for these small gifts, even right now." His dry eyes had turned back to the pillows and the blankets, picking them up with a grunt as he threaded them into his palms. "It's pleasant."

Another kiss against his cheek, one he couldn't resist leaning into-there were wordless conversations between your bodies that didn't need to be spoken. .

"I'll let it go for the day," you had murmured against the puffy bags under his eyes; ones that hadn't lessened from his nights of sleeplessness, but they did, admittedly, have a new healing considerations that hadn't been there before.

He hummed tenderly, curves sof faces pressed against your lip. "Sure you will. That's about as believable as any given woman's acting career after fifty." His hands pressed against your hips as he grazed his fingers against yours. "Here's my answer for the next ten times you ask-no."

Your lips opened with a softened, romantic toll as your fingers caressed the side of the threads of his mane. A distant softness taxed in your eyes.

"Oh, boy. I know that look. Here you go, you deranged little romantic."

The teasing gracing to his words were as present as always that came only from someone who had a rich fondness for someone even down to their flaws; you said nothing, but the way in which you looked at him forced him to have nothing but the empty space to try and fill it with his own words.

"You know it astounds me that no matter how much I dress up an answer, it still has the same end emotional result with you of stubborn persistence. I don't know if it's cute or if it's excessively deranged, but it is discerningly fascinating. Especially for Hollywood. It would be worthy of contempt for most people here. Good thing you found me, you sad little lost bird in this big by large and black world."

He leaned forward and pressed another kiss to your lips, the connection as detrimental to the reminder of why the disconnect of his answer was a 'no' on a superficial layer, but there was a trembling quake of conflict and desire underneath that superficial and quickly spoken answer-the worst part was that you knew it, and you felt it ,and you saw his true conflicting disparagement. He almost would have disliked you for it, had it not been for the fact that he was so profoundly connected to you that even being seen to what would have rendered him to a vastly uncomfortable degree felt like it was a release of a white gift with you.

The noise that was surrounding him in the present moment was an array of people distancing themselves with their issues through blaring music, kissing, and alcohol was a chaotic comfort, along with the moving dance of the way that the various people and noise around him was pushing him to the side of his distraction, causing another well wanted but hardly successful distraction, complimented right along with the blaring and nose driven music.

He had come here tonight to drown, frankly- the same dysfunctional, disoriented way that anyone ever came to such chaotic places, even if they themselves didn't realize it. He needed, on a detrimental level on this night in particular, to distract him from that incessant ringing that was on the edge of his ears that he now knew well enough that came from issues he didn't want to ponder too much, if he could help it.

His eyes were black and tired from the night that he'd spent not answering you before the ceremony that, ultimately, he had decided to go through with through the intense back and forth of your energies- and, in particular, and this had been especially significant to the black, puffy marks under his eyes, the absent of the ghost of not having his non successful habits of a desperate attempt of sleep spent with his plush, innately boyish disposition cradled welcomingly and gently wrapped around your body.

"Are you coming to bed?" you had asked, your body pressed against the frame of the door, hand grazed against the side of the frame of it with your fingertips gently pattering against the wall; he felt that familiar turn of tide of a heated longing stick into him that was entangled in his longing

"Depends.'

He started to graze his fingers against the blanket and flew it over the couch, looking at you with an air of attitudes-tenderly wrought, but teasing in an attempt to separate himself from you nonetheless. "Are you going to ask me the you know-what-question anytime soon, of which I've given a clear and coherent and well deserved blunt response to at least-" His eyes flickered upward in thought. "Ten times?"

You paused. Your lips had pressed together, and he had wanted to kiss them-but the words that came out of your mouth halted any desire. It was long enough that Bojack started to increased the rhythms of organizing the blanket in his hands as he spun it around his fingertips, turning it over to the pillow as he laid it gently on the side of the couch for the sake of having an aimless distraction.

"Finally, somehow who has just the right amount of pretentious pausing. I always like that about you. You somehow make even the most tension based situations somewhat charming."

He started to ease himself onto the couch. The worst part in the romantic dynamic of the estranged conflict of the desire of forever that was entangled into his complicated psychology that he knew executed intimacy neither of you could ignore the depth of; he had been only half dressed, the apple patterned shorts of his underwear being the only thing that dressed his body as he grunted in his clumsy manner and started to ease himself off of the couch he had lied on, allowing you to take the bed for the night for the sake of separation. The moonlight had been melting in from the window along with the pool, and it had traced your already delicate body as you swayd quietly and watched him get himself up.

"I emphasis on somewhat. I would much rather avoid this increasingly repetitive conversation. Not because I want to disappoint you. " His plush, molded shoulder had grazed the couch as he leaned it on the back of it while he twisted back to look at you. There was a soft crack in his voice as he added;"It's because I don't."

He had almost enjoyed the silence, but, admitalley, his hands were grazing the blanket with an increased tension-he wanted you desperately that night physically, because of course he did-he always had since the moment he had realized that you, by some miracle, took care of him in the way he needed; and the most surprising part, you wanted to. As desperately as he needed it, you just as much wanted it; a dynamic that went to such sweet desires that it run further into states of a golden sight of affection that he hadn't known existed-and he dared to even believe it was the closest thing to understanding love he could get.

But commitment?

The irony was that he was punished too for the way he could no longer stand being near you for too long without feeling that almost bloody desperation to be with you forever, to be fully yours; he felt it too, that bittersweet and honeyed gentle yet demanding fire to not stand being yours. But to make a promise when he had long since realized he had little faith to give anyone much of anything; that was the wall that wrought him to an exhausted end of defeat.

It was in a newfound desperation with the increased distance that he had to force the both of you to endure from his lack of answer; he had felt that night to a significant degree from his emotional shock that came from the weight of the two of you that he still couldn't bring himself to process how to handle questions and the weight of what it was bringing and would bring. It had all escalated so quickly, as everything with him did, but this time there was the wiegth of meaning, and he both longed and dreaded all of it at the same time-your connection and its increasingly speeded intimacy, and, most upsetting of all; the finger on his cheek, tender caressed complimented conversations-the most irreparable cobweb that made it all an enlightened experience that by large came over all else.

In a way, it threw him into a black hole that night; your tender discomfort at his lack of commitment. Naturally, he responded in the best way to such a heavy feeling as much as he was able; jaded wit.

"What's wrong? Cat biting on that tongue?" He spoke with an attempted smirk. "Your hesitation speaks of yearning unfulfilled desires. Can't say I blame you, considering, you know…the body."

How he was so cocky and timid all at once, he never quite figured out. He seemed to be multiple people estranged in one complicated form of defense of the lack of answers he could give you; and how much he wanted to hide the loathing of himself for the fact.

Though he had tried to use the words to teasingly ease the tension out of the air, there seemed to be a newfound light of a glint of tears on the edge of your eyes, and he felt his stomach drop in the observation of it.

"Come on. This is just…you caught me at a bad time. That's why you're emotional. Right when I'm half naked in the moonlight. Excessively, tragically romantic for the content of the conversation. Almost like you planned for the pinpoint of me feeling guilty."

"I don't know why you keep changing your mind. Why you keep going back and forth."

Though the tenderness of his heart clenched, he felt a commitment to his sense of denial. "I can sense your irreparable desperation. I would say sorry about that, but-" A sigh, a tender caress against his neck in nervousness. "You're putting me through your own ringer too by always asking."

"You know I can't help but keep asking. And wonder why you keep backing out."

"Ah. The questioning woman speaks." He kneeled his body against the couch, enwrapping his blankets against the sides of his body. He pinned you down with a conflicted gaze. "So what's your consensus for the night? Are we playing this game, or are we spending the night going to bed without doing the golden band shit."

Your lips raised into a shy, apologetic and knowing twitch.

"Marry me."

Every time you spoke it, it hit him differently. There was an astounding, profound shock to the way you spoke it; a tender resolvability that you truly did believe that he was the most remarkable person you had ever met, that you wanted to spend your life with him.

And yet the only reaction he could manage was that of the idea of comforting safety-avoidance and denial.

He spread out his hands in an exasperated fashion to the couch beside him.

"Couch it is."

A breath, not so much a sigh but more so an excessive, exhausted breath, left your lips. Bojack timidly pressed his sheets further against his body as he readjusted himself to get back onto the couch. A black punch overcame his chest as he saw you turn into the bedroom.

"I love you." Your body turned into the bedroom entirely. "Goodnight."

His eyes squinted in a timid, last minute thought.

"I…" He gripped his fingers nervously against the blanket. He tried to think of a response to speak as his eyes flicked up to where you disappeared, and through his guilt did he quickly shout; I'll see you in the morning!"

The words hung in the air unresponded to. It was embarrassing. The words were spoken awkwardly. Almost apologetically. He grunted when he fell further into the couch.

There was no response, but he briefly heard a muffled response-one that you would have given him whether he deserved it or not, he knew.

That incessant of guilt had decreased when he allowed himself, for the first time in nights, to allow you both to have the permission of getting lost in each other that night-though it was a torture, in a sense, knowing that there was that unspoken emotional conversation between the both of you of what you could see in him but of what he wouldn't dare admit- that night he had caved and had allowed a few freshly allowed moments of quiet within the chaos of the both of you to dipisspate as he curled into the curve of your body.

He had done so at first shyly, timidly-but one soft murmur of welcome that poured out of your lips was all he needed to feel any continuing breakage in himself melt.

"Come here, sweetheart," you invited, raising up the sheets.

Something had been defeated in him that night.

"That's one thing you don't have to ask me twice tonight. He shouldered himself into your body as he allowed his plush body to curl into the mattress. Despite his attempt at confidence, he had come in turned with his back facing away from yours as he had tried to keep a dignified distance, ears lowered and head softened into the pillow.

"Don't worry about it for tonight," you had whispered on his shoulder. "I love you more than my own discomfort."

He paused, consideration at your words that he was grateful didn't paint on his face. He had only let out a soft murmur. If you had seen the timid uncertainty on his face, you would have known his other answer, and it would have been another exhausting rejection.

Some rhythm had been meet between the both of you that night, with you wrapped, arms, legs, sheets and all parts of your other flowered intimacy against the middle part of his plush body. The friction of both of your energies-yours comforting and his hidden and uncertain, was met between the soft sweat of the wrinkled sheets. It was a mess of an array of his unknowing discomfort and the sheets that gently encased your bodies with a graceful and softened, messy array of what admitted chaos, and yet a full and absolute spiritual completion in the middle part of the simplicity of the intimacy that was between the both of the friction of your skin, down to every last detail, even down to the inches of his leg against your own, the timid nature of his fingers pressing against your own tips as they rested on his plush form. Your breath eased against his black waves of mane that would have rendered it an otherwise unremarkable night that was between the welcomed richness you shared that made even mundanity feel like an experience.

To think about now, with the intense denial he had given you yet, and the foggy disparagement of the crowd and the rhythm of the noise of it as the crowd of the complicated ceremony went on, only made a flooding of a black sensation of the failure he had given the both of you through his answer more intense. It was that cynical, yet always right, voice that was jamming, borderline demeaning to be paid attention to on that night in particular, around the side of his sense that rendered the space disoriented, panicked, and black tinted. In a twisted sense, he was grateful; there was very little, if any, time to think much about how sick he felt.

Blurriness was something that was becoming excessively comforting for the particular black and disconnected sensation as he shoved his ay through the crowd, fingers meeting jamming bodies and plush, dancing dispootions.

"Watch it," one particularly large seal spoke as he shoved his way through her. Her lage and gleaming eyes had snapped over to him with a flash and narrowed jolt of her eyes. He have only given a soft passage of rejection as he had continued to rush his way through the crowd, shoving past the people he had invited over to the mansion that as shaped like a large and heighted cylinder, several large levels of square height from the tall building leading from floor to floor that were all excessive in their tables and places to smoke, outdoor platform and pools on each level, a certain level of grandiose height to each level that made up the stack of the building and of the staircase. It had a certain multi millionaire renaissance feel to it; plenty of room to invite more people he had ever known, and even more people to drown and to hide himself in.

"I literally don't know who you are. I don't care what you think."

He saw a brief flash of the man standing in front of the woman he had shoved to the side snap his eyes over to Bojack in a heat of insult. "You prick-"

"One of many one worded and hardly throughout instances you'll think of tonight, I'm sure."

The insults were drowned through the rest of the crowd and the noise of it; he already had put up a wall of accepted defense of what the rest of the night would come to.

He had always known he wouldn't have lasted long once he had put that wall between his admitted emotional complication and his desire for you; and, on some level, something he couldn't quite yet process, your genuine desire of your admitted infatuation for being his. He had allowed the motions to happen, as he always did, and he had accepted and forced himself to go along with it; but the panic was still as thick as much as it had been those nights he had hurt you and changed his mind, even thicker than the amount of nose he had invited to not deal with it.

There was the source of conflict bewilderment that he was still trying to process from it all; that spiritual enrichment that you ever felt that way, his disparaging richness for wanting to know what that truly meant, and the deal breaker; the committed sense to not be able to understand how that was, and preferring to do anything but to find out.

The chaotic nature of how he was shoving his hands against the bodies in front of him was the best and only way that he could get away from the sickly uncertainty of the question that was poised on your lips on any given day-one of which wrecked him with a widening of permanently innocent eyes-no matter what they went through his own stumbling noise of thought-a twist of his teeth against his bottom lip-every rendered detail of what you knew caused you to ask the heat tinted and gentled questioned of romanticism that had made it impossible for him to say no to; you spoke his language too well in that indescribable way.

'Scuse me. Way-oh. Out-"

He twisted his body through the crowd, white robe draped around his naked plump toros that took to blowing around his body as he tripped his way towards the pelican that was standing by the DJ's music canopy.

He continued to trip as he made his way over to the side of the pelican that was in front of him, hitching his breath as he tried to catch his uneven panting to catch his breath from shoving through the crowd. The pelican raised his eyes as he gazed at him in question.

"Hey, bird brain." He grabbed his shoulder as he managed an awkward chuckle, reaching up a hand as he grabbed it firmly against his shoulders and tried to stop the swaying of alcohol.

The pelican cringed away slightly. His feathers graced his fingertips away. "Horseman," he said, bluntly, meant as a greeting, though with the way he looked Bojack over it was more of a statement of a detached disgust.

"Yeah, yeah. I know. I get it." Bojack's hands kept slinging in front of him as he took a pause to catch his breath, panting frantically as he did so as his eyes winced in exhaustion, ears lowered while he attempted to collect himself. He rolled up his eyes as he tried to recenter himself in his exhaustion, bumbling and modest in his helplessness. "I just wanted to try and come see if you had one of those-" He waved his hand in a circle as he gave a light shrug. "Distraction stimulants. I'll take anything you got."

"On your wedding?"

"Your unimpressed tone won't chase me away." He caught his breath a second time, rolling his eyes up as he tried to recenter his physical and emotional exhaustion and panic. A slight challenge came in his eyes as he snapped expression over to the pelican man."I know you have nothing better to do right now."

He turned to the side, frantically turning to the crowd as his eyes darted in panic to see if he could find you-then back to the pelican again. "You don't have anything that I could take around here, do you?"

He scratched the mark that was on the side of his cheek frantically as his hollowed eyes met the pelican, darkened and glinted eyes turned back to the various feast of the crowd as he took in their shouting and the sounds of their glasses clinking through the smoke ridden foggy noise of their celebration on the third level of the cylinder building of where Bojack was; that was what he thought, anyone, in the foggy muddle of his mind. Even as was trying to avoid you he was searching for you-but you were long since gone from the crowd. It wasn't that he was worried you would criticize or stop him; it wasn't as if you would, anyway; you didn't enable him, but you certainly didn't try to change him, a foreign concept he was still trying to accept.

The pelican raised a brow. "On me?

"Yeah, man." Bojack snapped his head back over to the pelican. "If I'm going to have a party, I at least want to make sure that I'm detached and bold while I hang around these strangers and drunks. Lost losers might be a better term, for them to show up at a wedding of someone they don't even know.

"I did think it was peculiar that you invited so many people. I wasn't aware you knew so many."

"I don't believe me."

The pelican watched him for a moment; Boajck started to graze his fingers against one another as he took in the pelican's clearly suspicious air.

"Look at it this way. You get this for me, you have another desperate celebrity out of your hair. Deal?"

The pelican turned around with a charismatic and experienced smirk that Bojack's own tired and trimmed blackened bags were all too familiar with.

"Anything to make this party easier on me. Please."

His voice was cracked and grated, not unlike the black bags from lack of sleep that had grown bloated enough that even his darkened tawny skin was unable to hide them. His mane was stuck in a multitude of directions, and he could feel himself cracking at the seams in regards to his bravery; he knew it wouldn't be long until he cracked.

"Make it fast." He paused. "Again, please."

The pelican swiped its hands around a small latch of a square box that sat at the end of the table by the DJ's table. Bojack's eyes turned into a frantic focus as his expression turned to the side of the smoking stick that the pelican presented to him, the stick delicately balanced in between his feathers while he presented it to him with a casual air and a hardened and distant look that Bojack knew all too well from the various places he had been committed to distain with throughout his wanders as a person.

"Thanks."

His voice was just as outlandish and gritted while he gripped his hands against the stick. With two trembling fingers that were desperate to focus did he allow his fingers to press against the stick, jamming it through the side of the end of his mouth, giving a quick breath and a tremor of relief as he felt the smoke blow through the side of his lips. He lost his focus as he saw a flash of a brightness interrupt his vision, and his eyes widened for a moment as he felt himself temporarily lose his focus on the thin and cheapened paper.

"Shit-"

He pressed his two fingertips together as he tried to keep it balanced, struggling to focus in the midst of his own disparaging focus that, if he were being honest with himself, were more of a projection of emotion than they were of any outward insflience. "Don't look at me like that. You've never seen a celebrity high off his ass before? Or, in this case, wanting to be."

The pelican, however, continued to watch him with that same animal in zoo-esque judgment that Bojaack knew all too well. The only thing Bojack offered him was a sharpened and edged, sarcastic grin as he tried his best to focus, despite the shaky and trembling disposition that executed from his every detail, down to his undecided lips and executed through his fingertips.

"That's what you get when you start making mistakes. Like committing to a woman."

The words were spoken with a mumble through the edge of the cigar. He could already feel the way the blurry tinted and chaotic scene was starting to blur around him-right along with any hope he had of keeping his emotions, a beats which he knew very little, if at all, on the ground.

"You end up feeling like goddamn shit. All the time." He gave a breath of the smoke, watching it blur the space with smoke. The pelican only blinked slightly. "Well, even more than before. There's always a way to feel more terrible, right?"

He leaned his body against the wall, his plush and round stomach spilling out from the ends of his robe as he lazily draped a hand against the window still. He couldn't help but smirk to himself fondly as he thought of what you would say to him in that moment; you would say he was an estranged from stereotypes of the average fifty year old man. Bumbly and soft, irreparably so, endearing ad lovable, yet complimented by some experience of a black depth and edge of wit that separated from a lot of comfortable men his age that more often than not had nothing compelling going on.

"A poetry in a casket of softness," he mumbled to himself, smile in his voice, as he leaned his head upward to the multi colored tinted ceiling in front of him. Smoke blew from his lips as he poured it out. "Some cute bullshit like that. That's what you would say. The romantic nut."

That endearing softness, a tender nature that seemed eternal of how it was executed, was a spell he got easily lost in whenever he thought of anything to do with you. You were his undeniable enrapturement from the rest of the chaos of the meaninglessness of what surrounded him, through and through, and that was the ironic display of battle of why he had burning black bags under his eyes and burning, red tinted conflict of a wrecked conflict in his chest.

Boajck took another breath as he turned his head back to the pelican in an almost entitled question. He waved his fingers to the pelican in an entitled fashion. The pelican gave a slight roll, but Bojack smirked cockily, knowing that at least part of him was enjoying the attention from someone higher.

"Come on. We both know you love this. Don't let this all go to your head. The attention from a celebrity, I mean. But you don't have to play cool. We're in this corner together for a reason."

"Just have heard a lot about you, is all," the pelican commented, wiping put several more sticks from the side of the back.

"Course you have. Mostly bad, naturally."

Boajacks' fingertips trembled again as he turned to the sticks. He reached up as he gripped the sticks around his fingers, smirking as he took them in. "Oh, yes, just the right amount of joints. Four joints. These perfect babies. They'll never leave my side."

"What's wrong with the horseman's inner projection today?" The pelican asked as he draped his wings around the side of the edge of the table.

Bojack gazed up at him with a glint of a sarcastic grin. "Horseman inner projection. That's almost cute. If it wasn't so corny. " He took a long breath of the cigarette, uncaring currently to how rude he sounded. "My girlfriend is asking me to marry her. Told the little nut countless time I wasn't interest for-" He let out a breath, the action almost timid as he blew it out. "Reasons." He hated the natural weakened innocent edge to his tone; it had been those soft and irreparable part of him that had gotten him to the softened edge of what he was addicted to with you now. He took another drag, enjoying how the smoke of it polluted the side of the increased polluted crowd. "It's ridiculous. I've told her a thousand times I'm not that kind of guy and I can't commit to that. She doesn't get where I'm coming from when I tell her that. I'm going to pollute her for everything she's worth." He allowed the sentence to sink in for a moment, feeling some strange tinged shock overcome him at the truth of it. "But she won't take no." He turned his head downward as he let the cigarette swirl between his fingertips. "So I need to get blown out my mind. So that she doesn't keep wasting her time asking it." His voice reached a new level of what was inside of him; a genelted and tender probable nature of a softness that could only come from one that, under an enlargement of complications and in an easy violent world, was someone pure of heart.

The Pelican leaned his body backward, smirk grating his lips that only caught a dull side look from Bojack. "I always thought that you were the kind of man that would love to be able to have that kind of egoboost. All the adoration, none of the commitment."

"Egoboost," Boajck chuckled. He turned his eyes over to him with a flare. "Look At you, psychoanalyzing down complete strangers. You should get a job annoying people?"

The pelican offered hima glare. "Yoru problems. Just my soutlions. Take them, don't-just offering."

His ears lowered, His defense faded as quickly as it had come. "There's no point of committing to something that I know I can't do. Pretty sure I've traumatized enough women at this point. And marriage is for consistent people. And I'm not consistent." He could see you know across the edge of the jumbling crowd, and he found that the patterns of his fingertip grazing against the stick was becoming more tender, more considerate, just from taking you in. "I don't think she's seeing me the way that I actually am. I….care about her, deeply. I think. And a part of me hates that."

He took another drag, shooting a glare at the pelican. "Your silence is everything," he said as he shot his eyes to him. "I know you're judging me."

"Do you think you love her?"

A sort of edged, balck smirk crossed his lip. "I can't love anyone." Another few inches of him swirling the cigarette. "I know that she loves me-the deranged woman tels me every day. But she doesn't see certain parts of me that I know for a fact isn't what I can do for her." His cigarette graze on his lip. " I know who I am. I know that this whole thing between her and I will eventually become what it is. I'll scare her off, hurt her-or any of those compartmentalized thresholds in between. So there's not really a whole point in pretending like it's anything else."

Bojack turned as he handed the used cigarette to the birdman. The Pelican reached out his wings as he took the stick from his fingertips, still watching him with that strange disquieted and listening nature as his wings took Boajack''s choice of delicate and desperate distraction from away from his most refreshing distraction of existence; you.

"Well, good luck to you. Rude as you are, something about you almost makes you tolerable."

Bojakc offered him a grit of a jaded grin, now leaning back further into the wall with both arms. "Tolerable. That's a compliment for the people around here."

He was both with you and not as his expression continued to trace the edge of your air. Even from here, he could get lost in you.

"It's almost cute, the way that she won't see these things in me,, but there's no truth in it. I can't promise her this wedding bullshit. That is for people who can fucntion.I can't even wake eup in the morning and be bothered to wash after sex. One of the reasons why rumors would spread about how bad I was to sleep with, and I still couldn't get myself to care. I can see the way she is. The kind of person she is. Do I love her? I don't think I can. It's better that I don't. I just don't think there's any point in doing things that involves commitment, especially when it involves another person. I can't believe that I'll stay true to it. Boredom, impulsivity, distractions, some unforeseen physiological insanity-whatever comes up. I know me. She loves me, maybe. I don't know if I can believe even that. But that won't carry her."

Theories of sensitivity of his inadequacy crowned the edge of his conflicted thoughts like a green and cursed grown. There was a bittersweetness to the way you asked the question., and it wrecked against him in a way that was more complained than he could find peace with.

"She'll ask again tonight." He clumsily placed the cigarette beside the table,stumbling over slightly, getting out agron of black amusement as his clumsiness a she did so. "And I want to be in perfect condition to say no to the point where she hears why. And the only way I can do that-epicly, terribly, terrifically high She asks on a day to day basis now, and its with all; the same sweetness and that womanely romantic look as much as anyone would expect with someone who asks on a nightly basis. I would almost make fun of her for it, if it wasn't so exceedingly sad."

Every day you asked were the marks under his eyes increased from a sleepiness night; not because you mad him uncomfortable, but because there was deterinatal awareness, an answer that sat on thee edge of his lips, and one of which he was afraid would leave him one day, and yet to hide from it was running him, and it was leaning even into your tried stricken eyes now, the red underneath them growing with his every passing balck eyes.

The irony of it all wasn't lost on him-to love someone so deeply that to commit seemed like a crime.

You were timid and suggestive and a little more tired some days more than others, but there was always that genuine authenticity of a deepend and profound desire for him to be yours-and that he knew threw him into a state of bewilderment of lack of understanding to the drapes of what you saw him through. That was the only way he could be loved; through foggy drapes.

He gave you the same answer of what was always a tender but jaded exasperation, complimented by a soft and tender notion, usually a ghost of a caress if his finger against yours, a kiss on your knuckle, a look of softness and a quirk of a smile that came from the ede of the purity of the heart you had unraveled, not perfect but certainly profound in its purity, and a softened understanding of affection of almost devastating richness of a connection between two opposites would be met.

And then the bluntly spoken and overfmaailzired word that was becoming associated with both dispaning ache and rejection all at once;

"No."

OOOOOOOOOOO

He had left you at the table a couple minutes before, telling you with jumbled words and slightly dissociated, squinted eyes that he "would be back in ten, don't make a big deal about it if I'm gone for longer."

In a strange way, you felt you were fighting for his soul. It was the most disparaging transition you had ever fought for, and yet somehow, in an odd compelling heaviness of what had managed to fin itself through the sharpened tinted glass of the shards of the word around you, it was the only thing that felt worthwhile.

You had been observing him ever since he had stumbled his way through the crowd and up the stairs from across the room. He was high when he had sat down, and he was getting more high now. Somehow, even these violent flaws of carelessness that he thrusted upon himself were made of a beauty that executed itself to a further act on the side of his disposition.

It was a spell, taking him in. There was something about the clumsy bumbliness of his body, mixed in with the carved natural emotional intelligence that only came from somehow who had a natural insight, wisdom, and jadedness of that from somehow who knew and understood only from somehow who had truly suffered. He was an alluring combination of soft shelteredness that was boyish and begged to be taken card of, lest he implode; excited by the soft plush of his round stomach that jutted from his hips, the natural curve of the side of his teeth that poked out from his smile, that innocent naive glint that graced his eyes. And then all at once was he somehow was was tragically enduring with that jaded wit, the black puffy acts slashed onto his eyes, the way he carried himself with a knowledgeable air that he knew, felt, and understood the majority of the human nature and confriton far more than many. He had an innate talent for seeing things for what they were, though he did little to weaponize it or to benefit himself; rather did he let himself get lost and tormented by it due to the boyishness of his nature.

His bright yellow robe, a testament to the flowing of the strange almost royalty grace that could succumb to his air at times, pushed through the edge of the crowd until he stood in the middle part of the side of the multicolored laden wall, smoking the joint that was placed between his fingers, with his tender stomach and molded body of softness that could have rendered a brisk fume of stinging red on your eyes just from taking it in. There was something about him; a strange sense of sophistication and of a graceful and gentlemanly air just from the way his disposition was traced, most especially with the way the air of his body gave away to a certain kind of self assured knowing flare that rendered you weak with pride, especially knowing og the contrast of how he huddled himself into you in the late parts of the night and had succumbed to that boyishness.

Much like with most, there were multiple complications of who Bojack was. He seemed to have reached a lack of care on nights like this, when it seemed as if his narcissism and cockiness had reached a pinnacle of a climax.

Partly because of how far you had been pushing him, no doubt. The man had an entangled reaction to discomfort, and there seemed to e little to no end yet of finding the end of the ribbon.

You could see his mouth moving, teeth glinted from the white of what spoke of a well earned and superior life, and because you couldn't hear what he was saying, it seemed as if he was reduced to a softened, quiet allure of your infatuation in the midst of the rest of the crowd. He had a complicated response to your affections for him; he was a man had was drowsed in excessive confidence because of superficial success, but the parts of him that were human were long since drowning.

You were aware of his every detail. His eyebrow quirked in a charismatic and sharp way as his lips raised upward; no doubt he was in some catty wit of conversation with the companion he had temporarily found. That was what Bojack was used to, after all; temporally.

Perhaps, then, one of the reasons why the concept of a ring around his finger was a fight for something that seemed to have very little, if any, conclusion to the complications of how he tormented himself from a denial of that which he wanted.

He was dangling the cigarette between his fingers as he talked to the pelican front of him, snout and responsive expression traced by the blue light that traced against his face, giving away to a startling blue against the deepend hue of his skin, once against rendering you to that almost maddening desperation to be his. Worst of all, you knew he wanted it himself. Worst of all, he would keep denying it for his own complicated reasons. And worst of all, there was no coming back from the hole of longing of which you had dug yourself into.

You were his, wholly his, and the fact that he had a tormented response to it left a numbness in your air that you hardly knew what to do about-and yet even that bitterness was a gift.

It was painful, the way that you loved him-what a bland way to describe it. Love. Like taking the complications of an entirety of a person's existence, in all of it unreasonable complexities of naucne of thought and feelings, and jamming it into one suffocating stereotype. God knew Bojack had suffered the worst of that.

It was a beautifying ache, just how deeply you knew that you would have enured or done anything for him; including hurting and aching for the sake of him figuring out why he denied himself to that which he wanted. His want of marriage to you was in the way you touched you, kissed you, the timid and damaged meaning of softness of how he gazed at you in the gentle morning. And now, most dishearteningly, the black under his eyes that were getting worse the more you asked. The conflicted look on his face whenever you mentioned it. The tired feel of his breath when he kissed you, even more polluted with the feeling of overnight whiskey than he had been before.

You would have let him go, if that was what he wanted, but the problem was that you could read his real answers before he even spoke them through the wordless ways of how he revealed himself. There was a strange bittersweetness in the pain of his answers of "no's" and "maybe next time's" and, after a certain point, "you know someone asking the same thing over and over with the same result is what crazy people do, right? You estranged romantic. You do belong in the city."

And yet you knew his true answer. Bojack was an entanglement of several codes that spoke of a different meaning than of what he said, and it was more often than not your job to read and see what they were actually speaking of. He wanted you; you knew he did. wanted you to the point of bruising your skin, which he had done, committed and done again, and would no doubt do it every time of which he was allowed, of which you were more than glad to give him. , deeply and without a doubt in your mind. You felt as if you were born to love him, and no amount of patronized conversation of superficial words, cackling of whispered conversations, of words of paciitacla advice would get rid of that slashed nature of desperation of ow you wanted to give that to him-that being everything and anything of every which detail of how he was, what he wanted, and how he wanted it.

In this case, it was a matter of giving him what he said he didn't want.

"Simple people in complicated situations," he had hummed one afternoon, body lazily pressed against the couch and dressed in fruit laden shorts. "The majority of the people in this city, right?

"Lost, sad losers. Gotta feel sorry for them. Almost."

He had been referring to a celebrottys terrible published mugshot, but there had been a reflection in his voice that had spoken a certain quiet awareness that what he meant was the man who spoke the statement.

The way you felt was engrained ina deep sense of spirituality that you hadn't known existed until you had been introduced to the narrative of the freeways in his face paced and every hanging demeanor. .

You knew that any given question you could ask that would promise an eternity with him, or any given 'good' thing that would come with the term of commitment would be one he would inevitably say no to. He felt he didn't deserve it, an irony not lost on you of the fact that he, as far as your own softened kissed and melcohonic observation so his every innate air was concerned, felt he was the most remarkable person who deserved it the most. No one agreed with you, even less sympathized with you, including the maggomy painted main himself, and yet that was all the more reason why the narrative fumed in your essence.

The thing was was that the majority of the most remarkable things in life made very little sense. It was his lack of depth that had enflamed an astounding amount in yours, and it was that to which you wanted to cling onto.

Bojack had, in his own way, a certain kind of maturity, perhaps not on the technical level, but in a twisted and foggy way where he believed that he genuinely deserved to think that pushing you away was some admirable act from his end.

"You want marriage? Here's a' noble' and eternal sacrifice from my end that parles to my version of the way you think a white dressed, only half potentially astounding day of cake and mostly strangers would be in that romantic and foggy narrative you have going on in your feminine brain of the train you're catching for trying to find purpose in me. Here's my version. It would be keeping you away from spending a life with me." Eyes turned down into the coffee, steam raising up and grazing his face. "You're very, very welcome." It was those statements that became the common response when he stood by the counter, poured his coffee, more often than not back turned to you, that simplistic and dry 'what's to be done is to be done' look on his dressed up features.

Ironically, it was killing him to ask-he was unraveling at denying you. Bojack's heart was tender and irreparably pure, and it was the irony of the fact that he was drenched in responses that made him seem otherwise, save for the softened breaths of air of when he felt safe with you, that was the only thing protecting him. You saw this, understood it, knew it-and yet you had yet to solve it.

And yet that was the same reason of why you felt the need to keep going. He was, clearly and terribly, triggered down to the nub of the way you were asking the question on what was boderlining now on a day-to-day basis. The black of his sleepless deigns-and no amount of holding him helped anymore-executed by the puffiness of his bags, the bittersweet way of which he asked you 'good morning, bedhead' with a kiss grazing your lips. of secret breathless answer that he was giving you that he did the same thing; more so, even,, but there was stange conflict that caused him to become paralyzed within you, and all brought on from the irony that he did dare to love you. Although it was tormenting him to deny you, he wouldn't dare speak of the torment out loud, much similar to the way he refused to speak certain weakness for the sake of guardian yourself and him. He was a tragically authentic person in the vast majority of ways that was brought on by his impulsive boyishness, and though there were parts of him that were jaded and guarded, there was just as much the irreparable sweetness to the way he took you home every night, nights he had pulled you from bars full of predators and had placed you in his car, carried you to bed, d kissed you, murmured and talked to you with a a certain sweetness that brought you a white washed gentleness of relief that can only come from somebody that truly and genuinely loved somebody-not just love, but the wiring of loving someone deeply, purely, and functionally, in a way few have or ever will have had.

He was wonderfully, darkly, and undoubtedly real, and that was all that had come to matter ina world full of fake narratives and people with tow inches within them, if even that.

Being in love, in many ways, was an odd kind of tragedy when you fell for them a certain way. Bojack was your end in life; everything had led to him. It wasn't really so much about possession, the marriage concept or of dedicating yourself to him, but it was more about the way he was physically good for you;, the feeling of a desperate and emotional psychological need that people by large could ignore if they wanted to, but most would be fall apart in small details over a period of time the more that they continued to ignore the need to love another. You had been spared from this foolishness, though you were awae dedicating yourself so deeply to one as estranged and disoriented as Bojack was taking a mark; and yet what a wanted mark it was.

There was a relief to the way that he talked to you in the middle part of the night, gentled whispers as his breath grazed around the sid of your breasts with a smile that grazed his snout and poked lips, and the softened excited and far less cautious man who had always been told he was wrong would leakout in the middle middle of the night with his eyes squinting around the side of the end of the deep end wrinkles that caressed the side of his eyes. His voice was laden rapsy and deeply wrought in his masculinity, eyes glinted in a contradiction of lightness of the ways in which he spoke with this natural emotion of a tender nature that spoke that he felt a freedom that he loved you as deeply as you loved him- but yet there was something about him that was keeping him away from properly executing it the vast majority of the time.

Yet still, in small ways, was he coming home to you, fighting through the irony of the drenches soullessness of that which he had been surrounded by, more often and y large surrounded by people who had long since forgotten what it felt to feel or be connected to much of anything at all, digging up into that unraveled broken purity that simply wasnt made for the world of what he had been jammed into, a road of pain that he had trvaelled to escape his own pain, and yet, through that tripping of the escpaing of it had he only become more undone.

After a certain point, the spell of being lost in his air, the confident smirk of the edge of the side of his snout lost amongst the blue light of pollution as he twsited his way out into the space outisde of him.

"What's up, lowlives! Big BJ coming to screw your small lives over, just the way you like it. Twist your hand into the side of your crotch and squeeze it tight to get that orgasm from looking at me, I know this is the best blow out you'll get all week."

He was high, sturng, on the influence, and undoubtedly in his famailizred element-and that seemd to be what he preferred for the night.

You turned as you forced yourself to accept the spell that was broken now that the foggy infatuation of the way that you had taken him in was torn apart, brought back into the spell of an unwanted reality. You could have watched him, observed him, to almost a sort of kind of incomprehensible for the rest of your life if you had allowed yourself to-if he allowed you to. There was almost a comcial irony to it all. With any other lover, you would have never allowed yourself to think you knew what they wanted if they told you the opposite, but the thing was that Bojack wasn't just any other lover. He was your end, your beginning thst started before you knew who he was, and there was a profound, pained black grief to just how much the words 'too late' held now that you knew what 'too late' actually looked like.

There was nothing about him on the technical level from his mundanity that made his remarkability particularly remarkable, and yet he wa s a series of profoundly wrought and terribly undone lessons that were intensely discovered only through his parocualr sort of air. He was profound in his own gentle authentic and flowered humanity-he never tried to be anyone else, and that was what rendered him with eyes trailing to someone who was real within their flaws in a vastly ever changing and unreal world.

There was a certain kind of humanity about him that you were addicted to, and you had hardly realized just how much it had done to you to be able to find him the way that you had-who would have thought that nights of kisses of alcoholic impulsivity, both ends of energy expecting a superficial experience by large as breathy desperation grazed agustin breathy desperation, trembling fingertips and curves of your opposite body against his plush one, until the kisses had,in the most natural way possible, given away to a softned and gentle slowness of increased awareness that there was a particular golden connection; for it was golden, like a sunlight edged tinted morning, and slowly had the kisses become softer, the edges of his clearly usually impsulive and blacly irony drenched fingertips slower, and finally; a soft accepted of a wordless admitacing of 'oh, there you are'.

The commit of sweet agenda of taking care of him had gripped you months ago, and here you were now, unbeliveeing that there had ever been a life where he handn't been your finest, most worthwhile, gentled and yet intense commitment. Your lips opened, shaky breath leaving your mouth as you eased yourself up through the edge of the chaotic crowd.

"Bojack!"

OOOOOOOOOOO

It was bitter; the taste of the whiskey laden cigarette was tanged and distasteful.

"Whiskey and old cigarette taste like garbage. Who would've thought." He grunted as he flew it from his lips with shaky fingertips that he could no longer feel. "Best revelation anyone here'll have tonight. No doubt about that."

He flicked the cigarette into the pool. Several of the fish srippers let out a interrupted breath from their lips as they pushed away from the cigarette. One darted their eyes up to him in invitation.

"Keep an eye on me, scarly flirtatious wonders. Your aimless desires that go as long as those lashes may be fulfilled yet." A breathy, almost apologetic laugh left his lips as he waved his hands up in a careless shrug.. "Depends how high I get, though."

He snapped his hands against his wrist as he tried to blow some of the soot away, though he was now far gone enough that he was hardly aware of feeling it. "Right now, your chances are rising to guaranteed levels. Hang on tight."

The fish woman's eyes lowered, and unimpressed glint on her expression; she turned as she kicked the cigarette away. "Horseman," she mumbled under her breath, as if it was a swear.

"Cliche brain rot entitlement going on. I see." His eyes lower towards the bra laden and alcohol stained grown. ground. "My impulsivity will probably fix issues in about a few hours. Don't worry."

The stripper snapped her head into a shake of her head. "You're exactly what they say, Horseman. A miserable, playing chod.."

"Hey!" He stepped forward to the pool, but she flipped her body back into the water, He flipped a hand in front of his face as he felt the spray of the cold water hit against the side of his face. He blinked as he started to come back to himself/. "I appreciate the play on adding negative connotations to my name.Creative. I'll take those soft nuances of your contempt to my grave!"

Several other strippers were watching him from the pool, slim and organe laden bodies turnd back agaisnt the pool wall. Bojack squinted as he turned and watched them through the burning of the blakc bags under his eyes, one of which he was becoming incredibly more aware of, right along with every given drink and cigarette he had consumed. He offered them a quick flash and a wave of his arms, as if presenting himself on a stage. He stumbled forward slightly over his feet, letting out a grunt as he just barley managed to stop himself from falling into the pool. He offered a nervous chuckle as he offered the watching woman with a squirting smirk.

"I'm just jerking around. What do you think high celebrities do? Sit on their scary ass and watch cooler people live their lives?"

He lifted himself up, grunting as he felt his back ache while he kept one hand against the part where it ached. He allowed himself the relief of a sharp eye roll when he heard the sharpened whispering and laughs that came from behind him. A particularly low moan left his lips as he turned his head towards the cigarettes that he had left on the table that sat with the rest of the used up boxes by the laid back chair. He had already spent a good majority of time there, switching back and forth between the acts of desire of every given moving dancing boy that had seemed like an allure to the welcoming door of what he could have done; falling into the familiarity of chaos.

His throat ached. He reached ip and gripped his hand against the side of his throat, rubbing it with one thumb to dull the che. He had been smoking them throughout the majority of the night, and already was the majority of why he had started to fall into such foggy acts was starting to fall back into the foggy stages of detachment.

And yet, he still remembered. One thing about love, dared he to believe it even was that, was one thing he had never expected; it was impossible to forget.

The very marks of what he wanted to give you were on his face. There was an ironic endearment about them. Yet, no matter how many times you kissed the tormented bags underneath the side of his eyes, and understanding between the both of you that they were a sign of how the inquisition towards marriage was something that triggered something in him-ome bloody and deep and wanted desire, and yet it was terribly buried. And the pain it inflicted on you that it caused you pain to see what the question did to him, and the long since wrought complicated narratives of what had left to the complicated engagement of what kept making him speak the resounding complication of a hard tendered 'no'.

The kisses were something he never denied either of you; even his self loathing didn't go that deep. It was the one simple relief of something that he occasionally responded to within the discounted accepted of what was his tender melcoohony that was drenched in ap permanent t loathing of who he was and who he ahd been presented and told he was; a playboy, superficial, soulless, not unlike those that surrounded him, and how he had believed it, and therefore he had become it, and there was a lrge part of awareness for the both of you that it was already too late.

Sometimes, in those softly whispered tender nights of 'I love yours" and "take your time, darling, there's no rush to forever"-which was then quickly followed by; a conversation of reason,he almost allowed himself to believe that there could be truth to both sides of your voices.

"Life isn't a romance novel. I'm sixty seven. I do a lot of drugs. I've drank to excess. We don't have forever. And I don't know if I can give you what you're asking. I'm not someone who can ever be a 'clear' person with a straightforward answer.. I'm used to bad. I enjoy it. And I emphasis on enjoy."

"You give me answers all the time. When you want to. I hear you. Bojack. And I want you to hear yourself."

"Ah- there was an emphasis to almost-a strong, undeniable emphasis. Listen to that. And no amount of dressing up of words, how sweet you think I am, any observations you have about me in your romantic soppy brain is going to change that." A press of a kiss against your lips. "Go to sleep."

He was aware of his conflicted disposition of some sort of closed off wall- because he knew just as well as you did that the black bags that were tracing under his eyes were giving away other answers and responses that were pounding against him in sleepless nights and the abuse of hardered hours that seemed to be mercilessly taken by an ache. He knew you took it as a sign of an emphasis of what he wanted to give you; if nothing else, his unraveling was the one gift he could give you, but he was self-aware enough to know that there was some sort of by and large physical answer he was giving you, if only for the fact of how you read his increasingly restlessness in the night, of the slight tension when he kissed you.

How he wanted you. That was the very reason why he wouldn't allow himself to have you. He was estranged in any goodness he could believe to allow himself he could have something so good. Flirtation? Casual exploration? He had long since done it.

But marriage was too pure a thing.

The bruises underneath his eyes were rendered with a certain kind of desperate case of your own desperation to heal him, and though the desperate question you asked was accompanied by softened kisses on eyebrows, gently murmured of apology, your arms enwrapped and cradling him in the night, it did little to render him to the narrative of what he was; spiritless, superficial, common in mind and worthy of contempt and munandity by most.

It wasn't until thatmorning with when he had fallen yet deeper into his attachment to keeping himself away from what you could have asked. He knew it was coming, and so did you.

Every action displayed his inner loathing and exhaust. The sharp way of how he gripped the cigarette. The blowing from his lips. The increased exasperation from his eyes. He vaguely remember telling you, in his own vast existence of disconnect, that he would be right back. He was now collapsed onto the chair, hair pulled back, and at once point he could feel the grazing of ass against his hand, and a drunken chuckle was all he could manage as his hand pressed against it.

"Ass and flash. Now we're talking on how to please big ol BJ." He pulled the body closer to him. He was briefly away of a caress against his skin. It was cold and unforgiving.

He could feel your eyes on him before he even saw you. The two of you were connected in that way. There was a strange profound pain to being so connected with one another-Bojack didn't believe in true love, but he certainly believed in the edged pain that came with feeling things too deeply, and for once he missed the edge of detached irony that the majority of the city surrounded him with.

You could sense the detached and broken acts of how he went about the night. The disarrayed black hair, the black under bags that increased with the influence of the drugs, cocky air and smirk of detachment, the superficial way of what he was going about his issues. He was falling into what he always referred to, almost too comfortably, as his 'cowardly' nature-come nightfall he would be stumbling and drunk into your arms, hands groping your beasts, rapsy chcukles and all of which rendered you weak to how you loved him; every last innat emessy detail, and you dared to believe he loved you, but how broken and scattered the communication was, and how much the both of you were suffering for it. It was working, too; your fingers trace your palms and you felt the night move on in its meaningless toll of scholastic distractions. He was choosing his explosive sadness, the gaslighting of ow he had been thrown onto other people through his life of who he was-a terrible man, and yet that person didn't exist. Bojack was raw, and he needed to be tendered; you had to touch and love him like the glass he was to get tot get to the processing of the question, and then, once you both were aware of what was being introducd, en explosive canopy of reddned challenge to bring him out of his self contained wooden stalk of suffering that had been wpright by othesrs, and soldiifed by him.

But the irony of how much you wanted each other; it was hurtinghim. And that paralzed you into an impromptu paralyzation of you not being able to speak it.

It wasn't easy, the profound, almost ancient connect of loving somebody that has long since been convinced given the narrative that thwy were incpaable of committing , or of anything good-in the buriment of what he was had you found it a miracle that you had seen him for who he truly was, resounding and golden good entalgeented in unwanted applications by himself and others; and yet that rendered it all the moe tender-the fact that he didn't know the precious parts of who he was. It was bittersweet, through drenched in chaotic ironically, of just how deeply you wanted to caresss and ease it into him, and yet the process would be quite bloody, because of course it was; the man had been rendered a snothing but open wounds. The desire to be his was partly on you; there was an almost shaky and bloody desperation, so compelling and demenanding that it was impossible to ignore. What a complicated narrative to know he wanted you; he spoke it in the way he melte you at night; a boy drenched ina jaded man of one who had been forced to stand alone. The deranged desperation of the mutual love of what you shared that with his past irrevocable damage of every which relationship he had enrured, quite literally enrued, that prevented them from being able to give you the answer of what you needed, was an answer that you both needed.

And you couldn't find it

"Doing some acts against your girl tonight?"

"Ah hm. Obviously. That comes with a pretty clearly presented truth." Bojack mumbled as the stripper pressed her lips again his mouth again; he didn't respond, he was too far gone for either decision.

"Feelin' alright?"

He quirked an eyebrow. "Love the fake corny southern accent."

"Don't distract." A slender finger ghosting under his chin. "I want the Bojack juice."

He cringed. His hand gripped against the side of her own, snapping her away from where she was grazing his shin."There's no juice. Especially with such a lazily sloped together term. That is probably the most dogshit and superifical term I've heard in your attempts to fulfill whatever grimy need you want to stick your fingers in my business yet."

She was superficial and to the point of how she wanted to use him. He disliked her already.

"Don't be all grumpy." Another hand around his neck-he felt a strange discomfort shiver over his body. "Tell me what's wrong."

"You think that works on me? I've heard the same tone in bed more times than how many years you've been alive. I've ben having sex before you were potty trained." He was almost spitting now, and yet she remained untouched in her air.

"You are Bojack. I can tell from the attitude."

Loathing flowers in him. His eyes rolled back, though now it was for an overall loathing for the situation, and no longer at the relief of directing it at the stripper. "Good to know thats how I'm known.." It was a breathy spoken word of self loathing, mixed with an increased awareness of the pinnacle he was standing on.

He felt the breath of her mouth pull away from him with a squeeze of her hands that he was only briefly aware of; it felt more like a distant forced preeing. Her thighs wrapped around his fleshly hip. The statement had been spoken as a high pinched and uncertain question. He let out a sigh, hands pressing her thighs, too tired to continue his anger.

"Violent acts against myself and my body and the way I feel often go hand in hand." One head poked up, her thumb rested on the bottom of his eyes. "Resoundly. That goes without saying." Another foggy blakc blur. "No idea how your thumb got back there. It astounds me how I can speak to you with so much lust and you still don't get it. You young woman are wired differently."

"I can handle a lot of with it from most. but even you're pushing past your limit." He could feel her hands pressing away from him, leaving a cold and empty feeling in the wake of her touches. She brushed on the side of her body, as if to wipe away where he had touched her.

He grunted as he hoisted himself upward. "That's literally exactly what I was going for."

He was briefly aware of her body, slender, shiny and scaled, hoisting itself off of his own, blurriness waving and foggy headspace increasing. His eyes twitched and the bottom ofis puffy eye was briefly aware of movement, and evenless aware of the sudden act that brought him to the center stage of where a handful of majority were raising up their eyes.

"Hey, canned dickwads."

A hiccup left his lips. It sounded strained and uneven. He swerved to the side. "That was as uncomfortable as it sounded."

He stumbled, hand gripped further onto the stand. "Hey-o! When did this shit get all wobbly?" A chuckled grunt left his lips. He temporarily regained balance, letting out a disoriented chuckle. "Still better than most of what we see these days, though, right?"

He was briefly aware of the murmuring, vague laughing breaking in through the foggy chaos of what was blinding his preemption.

"I need you losers to pay attention to me for a second while I tell you the realest thing that'll be spoken tonight.." His jaded and black disoriented speech reached your eyes, and somehow, even in his disgruntled chaos, he was briefly aware of the blurriness of his eyes as he swayed and took you in. You looked worried; of course you ddi. You loved him. It was the irony of that resounding and intensified richness that was so profound it was rendered painful that was the reason why he was disarrayed into the broken space of the black bags of his tormented desire,s his lack of sense of being able to respond to it, and worst and most conflicted of all within his complicated and unable to be discerned narratives-how deeply he felt for you in ways that rendered him vastly uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable was putting it kindly.

There was a finalized broken snap between whatever had been full of tension before; some answer was reached. He had thoroughly destroyed himself, and there was a conclusion reached in his heart now; it was implosive and painful, and your own knowledge was reached in your own eyes. He picked up on it fully.

The question needed to be asked again. The disarmament of chaos in front of you was a man that needed to be fought for; most especially when he said he didn't.

If he fell apart, you would follow-that dedication was spoken between the both of you without hesitation. That was an understanding you had both reached since the moment you had discovered that connected stanza of the understanding of how you saw and felt one another.

There was some disquiet that surrounded the edge of the crowd as the microphone let out a loud, awkward ring that rendered the quiet even thicker. Several of the crowd looked up and turned to the side of where he had paused to look at you; his mouth hung open slightly, teeth poked out as he paused in his violent disarray of an unintentional lack of sensibility. At the end of it the space while they looked around the front of the side of the stage. Bojack was clearly fogged and detached to the point of lack of recognition in even the smallest degree; he was swaying to the left and to the right with his bottom eyes twitched, letting out grunts and breaths that were heard through the echoing of the microphone.

He almost wished you hadn't found him; the party seemed too small. And yet there was a deeper relief to it, but he had never known relief to feel so deeply troubling and vastly uncomfortable. You could instantly recognize something resoundly off and desperate in the way his eyes were unfocused and broken.

"I'm high as hell- and I just want you dickwads to know that you can spend the rest of the night forgetting about your pointless lives for a night while I put on some good ham of a music! Am I right?"

"Go home!" one voice called out. There was some cackles that spoke of agreement.

"Go home?" Bojack's ears lowered as his snout, still holding its grace even in anger, snapped as he looked over at the crows with a glare, etching into the soft curve of age of his expression, somehow retaining its handsome grace, even then. "I am home. This is it, baby! This is home for me. This is a party full of superficial losers, but I know that you're all going to take anything that you can to distract ourselves about stupid everything is, so let's party it up, bitches!"

He threw the microphone onto the ground, stumbling on the edge of the side of the stage as he threw his body over the side of the stage. His robe enwrapped and fell against the side of his body, half detached and half enwrapped around his body as he grunted and flew his body over the edge of the stage.

"Forget this."

He waved his hand up abruptly and rudley as he shouldered his way through the crowd. Several inched away as he passed them by. His lack of care gave away to a jaded disposition of uncare as he shouldered his way through the crowd-most of which stepped back and allowed him his uncaring blacked air of the burnt end of where his inner entanglement had brought him.

It was incredible, the way that your infatuation overcame you to profound degrees at the times when he had made it resoundly clear with words of what he wanted; but the inner language of what he needed was spoken only through action.

You needed to find him where he was at in his lost heart, and you needed to do it very quickly. It was almost a strange sense of a desperation that you felt in that moment that was brought on by the profound sense of tender nature of who he was; your hands trembled with a certain desperation that only came from a connection that truly rendered you as alive.

Your heart pumped and you forgot all else as you started to shove your way through the side of the crowd, shoving your way through the array of the crowded bodies and slews of swears that hit against your disposition. All else fell away except for the disposition of a twisted, oddly immature sophistication of the blowing of his robe as he walked his way through the crowd. The neon light of the pool reflected against his skin. He was stumbling and tripping over his feet as he made his way to the pool, grunting as he did so, muttering swears under his breath. Seeing just how uncaring he was towards himself only rendered your desperation to go to him all the deeper. Shock was now beginning to go through your body as you noticed him stumbling towards the pool. You reached into your pocket and felt cold metal graze against your fingertips; the very touch of it brought those nights of where you had sat by him on the couch; hand in hand, him with his charmed exasperation that already spoke of 'no' before you even asked, a gentle kiss of patience forgiveness from yourself to conclude the night. There was an inherent and deep loathing even in the the good of how he has responded to the answer, and a complete lack of faith in it, by all logical means, there was no reason for you to continue to ask of the permanent of a romanticism that he clearly considered himself on another planet of.

And yet your voice called out, in a broken and breathy shaky voice;

"Darling!"

The fact of the matter was that on every emotionally profound level, he was utter humanity. He was authtencially human, completely and utterly modern, heavy, and profound it, and you knew for a fact hat if you distracted him from the low quality narrative of who he thought he was and had been told and treated as, you could find him in that lostness and show him who he truly was; the emotional passionate manchild that was both the most compelling and soulfully artistic and charismatic, tender and beaten man you had ever met. He was a narrative of losses flung onto him by others, rather than the golden tint of life he truly was, and you would find that aimlessness he had been wrecked into that he felt on emotional level and give the good back to him- the aimlessness of him would be perfectly matched for the spirituality that had an endurance of several fights of any given challenge the would could bestow.

You lost him as you tried to make your way through the crowd. A particularly heightened body of an ox turned in front of you, hand jammed down a stripper's the time you pushed him out, Bojack's stumbling form was lost into the crowd.

"Where is he?" you asked, frantically turning towards the nearest figure. A teenage girl looked up from the side of where she was digging against her nails, smirk on her features, taking to looking up at you with a jaded inquiry. "What, your celebrity boyfriend? He's the laughing stock of the night."

"That makes two of you, then."

Her eyes flashed. "Whatever. I think I saw him stumbling through the left side of the crowed. He seemed a little out of it. But he always is. He's Bojack."

Her eyes looked down at her jewelry, unpressed and hardened nature in her eyes. "Can only imagine why you bother with a lost cause that doesn't even want you."

Her words hardly hit you; your only focus was the particular battle of who you were going after. You took a jaded breath as you shoved your way through the edge of the crowd as you tripped over your feet from the rest of the noise; because that was truly all it was; noise, and that was all it had bene rendered to since you had finally truth. You dodged your way fuhe to the pool. The crowd was lessening the closer you got to it, until you stopped only a few inches away from it. Your breath broken and shattered as your eyes caught sight of that robe that was the physical and tangible dressing of your infatuation, swaying around his plump form while you saw occasional peeks of how he shouldered his way through the crowd.

There was something about him that night that seemed as if it was particularly sophisticated, almost intimidating, that made him seem almost regal in his distant broken jadedness. There was something about him that made you want to fall into that sense of complicated and interwoven narcissism that was part of the reason for his distance. You felt as if you were finally seeing him for the first time; you had gotten hints and glances as to who he was here and there, but the fog of what had separated you from seeing him entirely was now lfiitng, and what you saw in front of you was a resounding spell of a chemistry of a perfect chemistry of how you dealt with the world, and most importantly, how you could care and take care of each other in kind; you were the caretaker, him being the taken cared of. He was a resounding perfect chemistry of how you melded together, and through that was the beginning of your end.

He had that certain stoic movement to the way that he moved that night, and the plush curves of his and the sticking out of his stomach as it poked through his robe as it swayed only added further to the observation of the way he was made in such a way that it was molded to your perfect allurement into something only felt to that powerful degree further to you and even beyond what you could have deemed in terms of attraction. The light of the various lights of the party, both from the outside as well as the lights from inside of the various stage lights flashing on and off in their color on the verge of the ceiling traced the sid of his snout as he talked to the people around him, easing his way now and then through the verge of the crowd as he turned his head and talked to them with a stoic and focused air-it was clear that he was keeping himself focused and teasing and charming well enough as he talked to the handful of crowd from handful of crowd, and watching him felt like an oddly panicked meditation; smoothing and drenched in that soft observation, while being at the curve of your panic of knowing that it was your job to keep him on the delicate thread of doubt that he kept convincing himself off of.

As you had moved from table to table, bit by bit of the party throughout the night, you had kept playing with the edge of your ring as a way to reassurance and ground yourself; and especially now, as you were rushing through the crowd yourself, giving soft remarks and words of apology as you shoved your way through the crowd, trying to keep your focus and head down through the chaos as you kept your eyes focused over to where Bojack was talking with charm and ease causally to one of the tall and curved bird strippers beside him, her body towards upward through the tight leather dressing wrapped around her chest and body, herself seeming taken enough by his distracted charm as he spoke to her. He wasn't being flirtatious; and even if he had been, you knew his lost and wretched heart enough that it wouldn't have been out of jabbing maliciousness as much as it would have been his timid lostness and inability to see beyond his current pain and the impossibly of trying to make sense of it.

"Excuse me." You spoke quickly as you continued to thrash your hands through the crowd, breathing heavily as you did so as you kept your eyes intensely turned over to where Bojack stood. Being nobody, and everyone already lost in their selfish entertainment regardless, you heard a few swear words and remarks from the people that surrounded you as you felt then sharpendly snap their heads over to you with their rude and careless expression; and you could feel the grit and reminiscence of how it felt to be wrecked by the world with nothing but your own truth to calm you. You hitched your breath as you rolled your shoulders and continued to rush forward while you kept the failure of the crushing weight of being unknown as much as you were able, and it served to be far easier with the target of focus in front of you. Though to some degree you had always harboed a strong sense of self; you had had to, it was the only way to survive the impossible spiritual pain of being nothing, you remembered that if nothing else, you had always managed to keep yourself knowing and in rhythm with your humanity; even when having nothing on the surface, there was something deep inside of you that came along with being human that had been soothed in your freedom even on the side of the streets.

Bojack had added a sense of profound comfort and warmth to the identity that had gone entirely into a void of pure survival-the comfort and stability he provided for you by giving you a name, an identity, a sense of home-and dared you dare to think, spiritual purpose, and that was one of the main forms of drive that was leading you to clarity to go to him now.

He was just finishing the conversation with the rest of the circle of the crowd; waving them off with that naturally graceful he had; and you could catch the lightness and the soft tease across his snout as he rasped with a small chuckle that you could glimpse by the curve of his snout as he talked to the crowd. He seemed to be making himself soothed enough by the crowd and his usual forms of his stagnant attempt at distraction; though for you, you knew that only meant you had to do all you could to ease through the murkiness of his pain better, which twisted into small bounts of good, twisted through the complication of pain.

You gave a violent breath of your desperation as you shoved the last of the moving bodies away and continued to breath heavily while you broke your way through the wall of people. Bojack was turning to the left side now as he chuckled lightly and waved the rest of the crowd away with a flick of his hand, and as you stumbled and moved away from the condensed wall where you felt the flicker of the heat of the crowd and their disdain of you, you knew it was time to break the wall. Through soft pants did you breath, "Bojack."

Bojack's charming, casual laughter and his detachment from the people behind him began to lesson, but he didn't react to your clear call out right away. You could see that there was a disbelief on his features at your calling out to him; and for a moment was there an interruption from where there had been the casual charm across his expression. He continued to walk forward and over to the barstool before he gave his full acknowledgement-he was certainly decent enough at convincing himself that the strength of emotion between the both of you wasn't a big deal.

"Can you refill this, please?" He leaned his back beside the edge of the counter, leaning his elbows on the verge of it as he looked over at the pelican with the drinks in his hand. The pelican nodded as Bojack lightly placed the glass on the counter, heavy hooded eyelids turning down as he looked at the space it left aimlessly, a cool grace of an edge of emotional exhaustion across his features.

"I wanted to talk to you." Bojack's eyes snapped over to you at your trembling attempt at words, your eyes turning up to meet his as you straightened yourself up and met the question of his, and his ears lowered back as he looked over you lightly, though you knew the narrative going on in the back of his eyes well enough that there was more black intensity going on there than he was letting on. His eyes even took to lowering into further dim exasperation as he saw you pressed your hands between the fabric of your dress with the clumsiness of your palms.

"Oh, no. Here we go. The canon's gone off again." He detached his elbows from the curve of the counter as he himself upward, gazing over across your body with narrowed eyes a you gave him a light nod. His eyes flashed as he looked you over; still with that attempt at causality.

"We should be feeling this out together tonight. Any way that we can."

"Yeah, well-" Bojack's eyelids lowered as he leaned his plush body back beside the counter, leaning his elbows against it as he gave you that complacent dry gaze, sloppily shrugging his shoulders. "Part of the entire point is just to feel out the night too, right? Try to see where it goes, involve ourselves into the weird people who made this their business, get involved in the crowd and do a little digging. Feel a little bit of the rowdiness of the crowd?" He gave you a clumsy, timid smile as the bottom of his eyelids upward in the casual tease of his expression, and the adorability of his exposure dressed across your affection.

"You're clearly uncomfortable."

"I do not think 'uncomfortable' would be the word I would use. More like-" He shrugged as he turned his eyes up causally in thought as he gestured with his hand. "-Just feeling out the crowd. Dumb stuff like that. You want a party as big as this, you can at least owe it to them to make sure you're a decent host. Even though..obviously most of them just came for the number of people anxc excitement."

He muttered his thanks as the glass was pressed beside him on the counter, turning his eyes over to the beverage as he threaded his hands around the neck of it. He leaned his stout body further back in that indifferent, lazy kind of way as his eyes lowered while he turned his expression back over to you.

"Did you want to talk about that specifically? Because that could have waited after the 'ceremony'-but more than that, there's nothing to ask. This is just the way things like this go." He raised his glass to you with still that same dry stoic look in his eyes. "If you need help on being coached, I'm willing to give..some of it. But you also need to learn how to learn on your own."

You stepped your way forward, your expression softened as you gazed over Bojack's expression. A glint of unknowing across his expression, teeth poked as he watched you walk forward as his vulnerable eyes watched you as you stepped your way forward. whose hands wrapped around the side of the end of his hands, and your fingertips threaded beside his palms, the silver ring easing beside Bojack's palms as it grazed beside his skin. His eyes flickered in alarm as he turned his eyes down to the intimacy. You could tell that he felt uncomfortable, and it wasn't hard to pierce the narrative together that it was because of him stepping off again.

"What are you doing?" Bojack's brows raised as he tilted his head to the side, watching the rest of the crowd with his timid and cautious gaze, as his aged and tender face turned and watched the crowd sped by him. His eyes lowered a she gazed back at you with a somber gaze. :Besides making a large scene of things."

"Shouldn't we? Isn't that the entire point? Or at least to want to spend time together throughout the night?"

"Hey." His snapped his hand away from yours, giving you a hard glare as ears flew down. "I did that for the both of us. Let it go. I'll call you when I feel like we can spend time together in a way that isn't just trying to appease the motions of what we think should happen." HIs body slouched against the side of the counter, melting further down as he gazed at you with dry insistence. "I did that my entire life, I should know. If you want to try and figure out how to make it make sense why I would do that tonight, willingly, be my guest."

"I'm not trying to force you into anything."

"Really? I couldn't tell."

"I feel the pain following me everywhere. No matter what I do. I know that you're changing your mind. This is all just a farce, a distraction, and I don't want you carrying around that poison in the back of your head throughout the day and have it become something bigger later."

His eyes flared in a stoic aggressive question as he looked you over. "Ok, so-don't. Because I'm not trying to do anything. Especially not a blue printed scheme." His snout turned forward to you with insistence, pointedly, as he raised raised his body up from behind the counter with a tired grunt. His eyes were timid, uncertain, but ultimately insistent as he flicked his eyes away in a quick frantic thought as he managed, rubbing the back of his neck in that humble timid fashion; "Here's a request from me. Why don't you just enjoy the damn event? Take it easy. I did this whole thing for you. Maybe you should try actually enjoying it instead of curating it into what you want." He turned his way back over to the pelican, nodding at him with that tired expression as he spoke somberly; "Another one, please. I'm going to need it with all the evident controversy going on tonight."

"Bojack-please."

Your hand snapped out and eased beside his wrist, giving a soft breath of attempt of interruption as you tried to stop the complacency of his request. Bojack gave a slight jolt as he snapped hard eyes down to where he felt your hand ease beside his palm, giving a soft grimace as he did so while he felt the silver ring ease beside his skin. He jolted as he tensed and turned his eyes back up to you; and the disgust quickly began something more somber, forgiving, tender as he met yours, expression falling.

"You know what, forget this, please." He spoke it with his odd somber grace as he turned his head to the pelican and waved him off. He turned his eyes to you as he gazed over at you in an oddly tender, if only vaguely challenging look as he stepped himself away from the counter entirely. His hands gripped beside your wrist as he pulled himself away from the counter, turning his eyes over to you in soft insistence as he separated you from any people being able to hear around you, though there was a slight hard edge in his eyes.

"Listen. I'm going to need you to accept the idea that this is what makes me comfortable, alright? I know how oddly wise you are. I know you can understand what I mean by this."

"By what?" The tension in your body began to ease at getting Bojack's attention, though you could sense the distressed distance between the both of you. "So that you can start to change your mind, dig yourself into an even further hole that I can't take you from while the both of us have to go back and discover life without the compact meaning we're giving one another-is that it?"

"No!" Bojack's voice was edged into a light of insistence; though as he took in the doubt of your eyes, the emotion on his face sombered. He gave a conflicted breath as he turned his eyes to the side while he thought in his guilt. "I just want us to both feel happy. Comfortable. We don't need to figure out every little thing tonight-as a matter of fact I would say it's out job to not." His eyes turned as he looked you voer, vague pout but intelligent insistence on his expression as he looked you over. "You understand?"

"But after this. What's going to happen to what we promised one another?"

There was a slight defiance that entered his expression.

"Nothing is going to 'happen'." His eyes emptied into that gentle exasperation again. "I don't know why you can't just live for the night and just let me do what I need to do to stay comfortable."

You turned your eyes down as you breathed frantically while you focused on how your fingers were embedded beside Boajck's palms, and though he hadn't pushed himself away from you, it was clear that the intimacy was a lot for him; the film of sweat around his skin was notable. The natural romantic grace of his embrace beside your hands was beginning to become more notable along with it; and you couldn't deny the slugth strike of inspiration through you to continue to encourage the slightest guide of hope as much as you were able despite the murky chaos; the only way it had turned out how to live a life as incessantly damaged and consistently superficial, inhumanity within inhumanity, as much as it had been in the past.

Bojack's timid expression increased as he gave a soft hitch of his insistence, teeth poked as he turned his eyes back to your wrist while he focused on it with vulnerable eyes. You noticed his fingertips had took to resting on the edge of the ring, and he looked up as he met your eyes, and as conflicted as his eyes were, there was a soft emotion in his expression that spoke that he wanted to reason.

"Ok." His raised up a hand in a gesture of defiance. "Why don't we just try to lie out what we both feel like-"

His eyes widened as he saw several different men and stripprs weave beside the both of you, his eyes widening as he stepped his way back with a vague and abrupt breath as he tripped over his feet while his air took on cautious intimation. Several of the woman strippers let out a causal, amused air in a playful and teasing fashion towards Bojack's jolt of surprise, offering him winks and a swing of their slender shoulders as they continued to jolt their way past him with their bodies easing into casual flirtation. Bojack stepped back intensely as his ears flew back, though his other hand kept in the embrace of your palm as he watched the jumbling of the crowd step beside him, the men offering Bojack a dirty glint and a raise of their cigars and various drug methods. His teeth poked as he watched the crowd pass by the two of you in its superficial and quick paced air; until the light in his eyes dimmed as he turned and looked back to you, hands still gently threased beside your palm.

You could see the distraction in his eyes-the slight interruption that instantly made your heart jolt in your chest at seeing it. You were losing him in his attention. As his eyes turned while he watched these strippers while they continued to tease him even as they were guided away with it the stout men and that were enjoying their service, you turned your eyes down as you frantically began to kneel yourself in front of him , your other hand coming differently grip beside his palm as you did so as your palms trembled.

"Christ. What are you doing?"

His eyes turned as he looked over as your eyes turned up to his in insistence, your palm gripped beside his palm as you did so with both hands, readjusting your knees as you kept turning your eyes up to meet his as you finished finding your place. You gave a soft laugh at your clumsiness, eyes threaded and red as you snapped your eyes up to his as he gazed at you in his worried question, though it was clear that he understood to some extent what was unfolding. A soft and exhausted uncertainty entered his eyes as he looked away for a moment, eyes winced, ears lowered.

"You cannot be serious."

"I don't think either of us ever did it officially yet. I want to do it now-in front of everyone, in front of people I don't know. It's what makes sense to me."

"Make sure you hit her nice on the ass to make sure she forgets her corny ass, Bojack!" A bloated toad, dressed tightly in a suit, rocked his body backward beside the chair as he raised up a glass. He cackled as he offered Bojack a intense wince as he raised up his beer, Bojack gazing at him with a slight somber insult. He turned his eyes dr yily back to your questioning gaze.

"You can take that as a sign that this dosen't need to be anything more than what it is." His other arm snapped gestured beside the chaos beside the both of you in insistence. "There is no way that anybody in this crowd is going to put up with somebody falling down on their knees. Like some sort of jammed up idiot." His eyes began to scrunch in question as he looked over you, something taking after a boyish insult. "You really think this is a good idea, in front of all these strangers?"

"Please, just listen." You readjusted the grip of your hands beside his palm, allowing your emotion for the moment to get the better of you as you gazed up at him in insistence, and though you knew your rocking of your hips and you nervous adjustment of your grip beside his hands was a bit much, the turn of your intuition and emotions was more than you knew what to do with. You gently allowed your fingertips to grip beside his wrist, insistently asking him to keep his focus on you.

A soft affection entered Bojack' eyes, lightning through the dryness; though he was clearly embarrassed and out of his realm of tolerance, it was clear that there was that warmth of affection for your bond coming over him again. It was warm, fatherly, in tune to your rhythm; home.

"I'm listening." His voice was more playful and warm now as he pressed his other hand beside his waist. He slipped it out of your hand, through he allowed his one to be cradled by both of your own. "It's not as if you're giving me a choice regardless."

"I need you to marry me. To promise-and I want us to do it now."

His head tilted back as he looked over at you with a slight insulted jolt, though from the abrupt reaction, it was clear he was taken aback by his lack of being able to accept the request.

"Now?" His tender eyes flicked up to the crowd. Most weren't even paying attention; the ones that were were the stripper woman who kept gazing at him with a flirtatious gaze. His eyes, dilated in the layer of his emotion, snapped back as he met your eyes. "Why now?"

"Because the pain is too great. Not being able to share life with you-to love you. I think I'd always had it before and didn't realize it-it was just this murky feeling that something wasn't right as the years went on."

"What, other than the starving to death on the side of the street thing?"

"I know. I know it sounds like a fabricated fantasy, a naive exaggeration. But I can't stand to not be with you-the pain ebbs and flows, but lately when it ebbs its been so great and so demanding that it's impossible to turn away from. It's so demanding and so intense, the way I know my life will have been nothing but an empty inhumanity if I allow myself to continue to live life as I did through the emotions of only survival while those with successful humanity swept around me."

"So. I'm your personal project, then, that you're trying to use to make sense of a hard life, is that it?"

"I won't deny it. But it's more about you. The way I love you is outside of myself; it's something far greater than me. It's something that takes me away from any concern of myself, and it takes and ebbs away the sickness of my life. I had always felt this innate feeling that I was made for more, filling out something into humanity and life and worthwhile experience; I never allowed myself to fully believe in it, but it was the most innate and constant feeling in my life, and now with you-it feels like something that is a confirmation that was always right. It feels like a devastating clarity-devastating in the sense that if I don't follow the literal and soil answer to my lifelong and spiritual suffering, the pain will follow me so often and will be so great and haunting that I will have no choice but to die." Your hands trembled as you eased your body forward, kissing your lips with an ease beside his knuckles as you breath trembled. "I know you know it, too, and that's the only reason why I feel this begging through the dispair is justified."

"Yeah. I can certainly tell."

"Can you please stop trying to make this my fault?"

"It's not your fault. There's not even fault to be had. This is a good thing."

"Could have fooled me."

"And I know you must be aware that this is going to be something that we both have to face together eventually. If you did want a future."

"Of course I do." Bojack's voice broke, and the energy in his eyes softened as he gazed at you with that broken emotion.

"Then we both need to understand and commit to what we're asking for long term-and that includes with you having to accept what being loved means. Of being able to have a sense of trust in it."

"Ok, but-"

"There's only now. There's only ever been now. Time is already passing. We're already at such a strange part of our lives, and there's only so much time left."

"I know, honey, but if you just-"

"This is all there is. I'm small, impossibly small, and I'm ok with that. I've found my peace-especially if it comes into regard of loving you with the time and space I have left. But you have to be willing to go forward and accept it for what it is, or we'll both stay here."

Bojack gave a simple heavy and conflicted sigh as he turned his expression away from you and over to the side, shame lowering on his expression as ears splayed. His slightly jaded fashion stayed with him as his ages eyes lowered in exasperation that was on his aged features.

Your knees still kept halfway kneeled onto the ground, gazing at him with still the shimmering emotion of your insistence. After a few moments of the closest thing to silence that could come from the white noise from the backdrop, Bojack turned his head pointedly back over to you, slight gleaming impatience in his eyes as he raised both of his hands and clasped them beside yours.

"Here. Get up. I can talk about you this in the morning, or in the evening, or the time those two times, or any other time other than the worst possible possible time you've ever come up with something that's this emotionally desperate."

He gave a soft grunt as he finished helping you upward, closing his eyes with a soft frustration as he helped you upward. After a moment of stumbling, you complied, but the pain in your expression and the emotional insistence of it kept on his eyes while he helped you stand upward. Bojack's hand stayed pressed beside yours as he turned his head over his shoulder and tried to listen to the other side of the door and the noise emitting from it, ears perked as he stepped towards the door where the crowd that was on the other side continued to ease from the other side of the door. After his ears had finished perking while he listened, seemingly to attempt to see is anyone was involved with your conversations or of listening to them, he gave a soft reset, turning his dry eyes back to you, eyelids lowered in a somber, dry resolve to the conculsion he had come down to for the night.

"This is something that we should have cleared up before we came here."

"We did clear it up. Multiple times. And then you decided to keep making decisions that made it obvious you weren't ready yet."

"You never said anything about doing it in front of this amount of people."

Bojack's voice raised, and somehow the harsh edge to how he spoke added to the volume and the intensity of it as he jabbed his expression to you. You stepped back at the force of the way he spoke as he gazed at you pointedly, and a soft glint of regret eased in his eyes as he watched you shrink, and his tone whimpered as he tried to come up with a counter to ease some of the tension.

"Of course I want this to happen. That's not what I mean when I say I don't."

"Denying yourself love is the same thing as allowing every enemy in." Your palm snapped away from Bojack, gazing at him with a defense, and Bojack's ears lowered as he watched you tentivaley, hands raised out halfway, but frozen in his place by his palms. "Every evil comes from denying love in. As love deprived as much as enemies and terrible people might seem, at the end of the day they're just people like everyone else who are using that absence against you."

"Jesus." Bojack's ears flew down fully, and the heat and glare in his eyes wasn't shy to be executed. " And what do you want me to do about that?"

"There's no point to anything other than finding fellowship. To avoid suffering. And I know that you've done everything in your power to deny yourself that. And you want to continue?"

"You're twisting this. Of course not-"

"You need to be in rhythm with everything. To accept your fully reality-yourself, for how you are. How else will either of us survive? How can you feel the fully joy unless we both perfectly accept everything as is, imperfections and patheticness-how you are?"

"I don't see how that's relevant."

"If you became innocent, pure, and detached yourself away from the measurement and judgment of the world that leaves you empty; you would become so lost within your own personal purpose that you would never need anything again other than the fully acceptance of what you are. The world is chaos, it dosen't know what it does to itself. Concerning yourself with it is futile. You just need to let go." Your hand reached out, fingertips threaded beside the back of his hand. "I promise. The pain of the emptiness of existence will never lessen, but if you give yourself enough gifts to fill up life and your purpose, you'll never need to do anything else but accept your helplessness and let it pass, rather than tormenting yourself over it.

Bojack's eyes dialed in thought, and his mouth opened for a moment, expression tense in confliction. A violent, sudden and demanding knock thrashed itself on the door-enough that it caused the both of you to raise your attention as Bojack gave an abrupt breath, tripping his way back as he stepped his way beside you. Your hands found the side of his waist as you heard him give a jolt of a breath and step his way beside you, hands trembling beside his waist.

"Horseman! And his wife, is that right? Is that the two of you stumbling around together behind the door back there?"

"Christ." Bojack's chubby hand reached back as he threaded it beside yours. You kept behind him as you stepped back, Bojack squeezing your hand for the sake of keeping you and himself calm. "Keep having a good time, guys, we're fine."

"Darling. Darling, please listen."

"What? What is it?"

Bojack turned back to you as you gave him a desperate tug of you hand, his breath coming out frantic in his frustration as he felt your palms squeezing beside his in insistence. The laughter and sound of the people who had just knocked in their superficial settled for a loud laugh as they turned, and already was the white noise beginning to fade; or so he hoped.

Your sweating hands trembling beside his palms continued, and he could see the genuine desperation ease on your face again. Bojack could only settle for turning to you in pity as you watched your conflict, the breakage of your emotion across your features. His tender eyes snapped down as he felt the demand of your fingertips across his wrist as his teeth poked, and the conflict stayed with notable tension across his expression. But there was a palatable change in the way he was responding to your emotion and request now; something about it that was becoming more tired, more tender, and he felt your fingertips tremble beside his wrist, and you knew in the quiet of that enclosed space that at least to some extent, you were reaching him. Your fingertips eased around the edge of his hand, and you bent down lightly, just enough to comply with Bojack's request, but enough to appease and to show off your genuine desire as his dry eyes followed the form of your body.

"Please marry me. You are the most profound person I've ever met in the entirety of my life. Everything about you, the way that you talk, the way that you breathe, your tender adorability-everything that you are ever have been or ever will be, it all draws me in. I can't stand it. I can't stand not being completely and absolutely years. It drives me mad, the idea that I'm not completely endowed into every way that I could ever dedicate myself to you. I want to do this openly and publicly."

Bojack's eyes were tender in though as the emotion in his eyes gave away the thought of your request. With a genuine and tender question did he ask, somberly and with genuine insight of emotional bewilderment;; "Why?"

"I want everybody to know just how proud I am of the fact that I get to love you. I can't even conceive of the idea that you exist, much less a being able to understand that I'm lucky enough to be able to love you. Your need for it-my need for you specifically. There's no denying it. There shouldn't be. I need you to understand how precious you are." Your head tilted, thoughtfully. "The problem is is that I'm not sure you're capable of allowing it, and I don't want you to keep feeling like this is the only way."

His eyes lowered again, and there was an emptiness in his consideration again; a dry and accepting melancholic and mature ease of his acceptance of who he was, or thought he was, and who you saw that idea to be; and to drench himself in the pain of it now.

His fingertips came to thread beside your wrist again, and the tip of his fingertip came to rest beside the feeling of of the silver metal beside your fingertip. You took that as a sign, and his eyes lifted up lightly to meet yours; wisdom and layered nuanced under his flat self loathing. There was something profound and insightful about human life the both of you were aware of in the way it demanded itself to the energy of a long life, of the illness of the mind on the earth that many denied for the sake of their own comfort.

"I think we should both keep our head down, do what we can, and go home." Bojack spoke it thoughtfully, slowly. and with the clear execution that he meant it as he trailed his eyes back up to yours. You shook your head, swearing lightly as you did so, and both of your hands gripped further still beside his palm.

"Please. Please. Don't lie."

His ears flew down fully again. "I am being honest. The very way you asked."

"Every single moment I spend with you is the best day that I've ever had in my life, and I don't just mean flat words with that."

"I cant' imagine that the competition is very high."

"I've lived an entire life, Bojack. Happiness dosen't come from what you have, it comes from depth. And I've had plenty-and yet, still, I don't care. I feel it, every second I am with you. It's indescribable. It's not about anything that has to do with me, but just the way that you make me feel every single day, and every single conceivable understanding that I could ever manage to experiment or experience with you is constantly unfolding to me. Tell me you don't want to celebrate that-to allow ourselves to that the one blessing that the universe let us have, or even if it's random, it dosen't matter. At least tell me you feel it, too."

He closed his eyes, giving a tense breath as h closed them, and you could see the trail of though pass by his expression.

"Yeah." He opened his eyes, heavy with his internal torment, and turned back to you. "I do. Of course I do."

Both of your hands squeezed further beside his hands, your lip raised up in your own approval as you nodded lightly and met Bojack's stoic acceptance.. Your fingertips gradually grazed beside his threading and caressing beside the back of his hand and breathed deep while he watched you.

"Let's go outside."

"No." Bojack's voice was stern, stoic as he spoke. You turned your head down, brows lifting in exhaustion. There was more demanding noise coming from the other side of the door, loud and demanding with the people thrashing and yelling out in their white noise on the other side of it.

"But you know what we can agree on other than the hint of what you're suggesting; we can go back outside." He turned his dry, matter of fact aged expression to the door, his other hand still keeping on your ring one as he reached out a hand and pressed it on the door, the noise from the outside already starting to trail in with noise and music even more loud in its demand than before. "We'll both figure it out and find our peace eventually. Promise."

"Do you think?" There was a genuine question to your tone, but an edge to it that suggested a mocking challenge.

"Of course. That's how you managed to survive for this long, right?" His hand shoved beside the door as he began to open it fully, already offering a quick chuckle as he waved while his expression turned to one of tentative performance while several people called his name as he made his way out.

The muscles on your face stayed exhausted and tense as you closed your eyes and turned your expression downward. Bojack gave a try of his loud, boombing party voice as he shouted out a statement that greeted the two of you back into the , the noise already surrounding and drowning the majority of the conversation and the space for intimacy that had been in the closed in bathroom a moment before.

"That's what I'm talking about! You asshoels better have been making the most of all these resources. It's not for nothing!"

Bojack's voice was rich and drenched in the favor or his teasing as he waved his hands towards several of the now far more drunken, fairly well of party goers that were stumbling beside several of the fountains, beside the bar of the DJ, the several people and crowds that shouted over to Bojack from the various places within the modern area where they had taken to talking. Bojack chuckled nervously but with that ease of his self reassurance and emotional confidence to talking with other people as he walked his way forward, waving to the various parities that turned to him in their inquiry. His fingertips and his hand kept squeezed beside yours as his thumb rested where your ring was-the only sign of a bridge he could have in regards to letting you follow him in your intentions.

"Bojack-"

You were blinded by the turning of the spotlight through the ease of the neon blue that surrounded you from the various lights, some of them blinding you to the point where you had to step back, threading your hands beside your eyes as you tried to blink the blind spots of out your vision. Bojack's hand, although still firmly threaded beside your palm, beside your fingertips and then released as he walked his way with that party charm over to where there was a modern round table that harbored several different people, some of them raising up their eyes into inquiry and insistence of leading onto Bojack's call as he made his way to them.

"Thought you might had run off. Something cowardly;y going on. We know what it's like with you famous and rich, coming and going and changing your minds." A black man, fairly young, sporting an old fashioned blue hat and trousers had his body leaned back beside the chair as he gazed between the both of you lazily.

"What?" Bojack chuckled, nervously, shrugging off the man with the attempt of his causal emotion. "No. That's crazy."

He looked you over, even as you stepped back behind Bojack, not entirely unlike a fragile child yourself this time, eyes eased down as your face leaned by the back of Bojack's body.

"Funny seeing you in person. They were right when they said that you didn't seem like the elite or their type." He chuckled, wide lip raised up as he looked you over. "Interesting how things fall into their place."

"I guess it's just a matter of living instead of stereotyping." Your voice was cut and edged as you spoke, tone meant as a jab. Bojack's eyes widened, though he kept himself controlled enough as he turned and gazed at you pointly. Some of the strippers, both human and fish and of other types, all dressed into the tight sling of their outfits, gave their small chuckles as they sat and bonded behind the table.

"Honey." Bojack looked over at you in a somber pointed frustration, though he spoke lowly, attempting to keep the energy between the two of you. His voice was respectful but somber as he spoke just intensely enough for the both of you; "Please don't embarrass me. Us, in general."

"I don't know what would be more embarrassing. Talking as things are, or refusing to allow me to be your wife."

There was a soft institution as his fingertips as he gave his exasperated and heavy breath, though your eyes turned up to meet his soft and dry expression as he threaded and tightened his fingertips beside your fingertips. It was a certain kind of a jaded intimacy to the way that he was responding now–although there was also that same sense of timid surprise on the edge of his air that hardly gave him any kind of compelling argument that he genuinely meant his dismissive nature towards your philosophies that night. In the past few weeks, everything had been in regard to a teaching moment; the value of flawed company verses the complete dispair of isolation. In his own way, even in detrimental self consciousness towards people he would never be enough for, he was allowing himself to love you despite the shards of the clear complication of the difference of how you went about existing from his end-and how that had led to such a difference in your emotional vulnerabilities.

Though he turned his eyes up to the ceiling in what seemed like a tense rejection as he took a sharp intake of his breath, there was a st\range sense of something that was clear of the increased price of profound worth and the indenability of his want to dedicate himself to you; his denial came from sort of strange black understanding of what would happen if he were, in his own way, to mess the gift up, not because he didn't understand it's life resounding value, but because he did.

As your fingertips threaded, squeezed, and contracted beside the spaces of his own, your fingertips lightly caressing beside the back of his hand, he could feel the profound nature of the way that you were inviting him to be yours in such a public manner. It was so vastly different, so profoundly different from the trashy and attitude he had ever gotten from most; and he had learn to take on the role of a superficial and trashy person as such. He had been so used to the trashy and dismissive, utterly disposable person he had been dressed up as to the majority his entire life in every aspect; for the majority of the time, any few good or rare thing he could feel about himself among the negativity had only been something he had been able to find in the small glimpses now and then for himself, and they had been few wrought and far between, and even less confidently believed.

"I just can't wrap my head around it." His eyes winced lightly as he turned to you, eyes darted downward in genuine conflicted thought. Behind him, the party sitting around the table took to dirty looks of their gossip and even more of drug usage. His eyes tilted up as he indicated his chubby hand lightly to the party, the air of his body profoundly adorable in his doubt. "You want to marry me in front of all these people-propose. To make that kind of association."

"It would be a woman like me that would even want to, wouldn't it?"

"What? No." Bojack could sense the vague bitterness in how you spoke, ears turned down as he stepped back entirely, his other hand coming away from where it was embraced in your palm as it came to rest tenitavely by his hands. "This isn't a statement about your worth. This isn't about you, in general." His eyes lowered in somber earnest defeat. "This is about your association with me. What you're getting into."

"I don't care. And this is your job; to accept that."

Bojack shook his head lightly, turning his eyes down somberly. "Look-I'm not going to pretend like I think you doing this is a good thing. There's still hope for you. You can still have a chance at stability. Not just physically. Mentally, too. I promise. There's still a chance you can have a sense of quality. But not like this."

Your head turned over your shoulder, and he could see that even still, your eyes and focus were somewhere else entirely; threaded across the space of the people and the crowd surrounding you.

"Let me do it here."

Bojack shook his head bluntly, eyes closing as the frustration snapped across his features.. "If neither of us can wrap pur head around it-then maybe we should just go."

"No-"

"It's not worth it."

The statement was spoken with a blunt statement as he cut through whatever other conversation you could have opened; the words cut off out of your mouth as you watched him with the intense look of your emotion, strange conflict as you allowed Bojack's blunt statement to cut off what seemed like the pathetic desperation to your words and of your erratic emotion. The true age became clear across his features as he gave an intense sigh, the wrinkles on his face into his skin as his ears lowered. One hand came to caress beside his snout-and by the time it had finished caressing his expression, his dry and empty eyes turned to face your own eyes.

"Ok."

His hand reached out as he threaded it beside your palm again, and your eyes eased down as you felt his palm thread beside your palm, and you allowed him to guide you as he began to gesture past the rest of the table. Your eyes were unsure, vaguely shocked as you realized Bojack was taking action towards what he wanted, and as gentle and inquisitive eyes turned up to his expression, it was clear just from his eyes that he was struggling to accept that this was was happening at all-his mind had been corrupted and by illness where the only thing that could have grounded him in his mental scars was the technical process of time, and you could tell now that enough had been triggered inside of him tonight that he wanted the comfortable and boring measure of brining you back home, taking you to rest, to forget the unpredictability and of the unknown that had occured tonight. There was a profound sense of his lack of coherent ability to even comprehend, much less accept, the fact that somebody truly thought he was like worthy of what you were trying to do for him tonight.

"Bojack-it dosen't have to take long, I promise. It would be more hard if you kept resisting."

"I'm taking you inside. No outdoors a few feet away, no people to walk up to and to try to associate yourself with. You're coming home with me, right now, or you're going inside to a place where you can sit and stop this back and forth nonsense until I'm ready to take you home."

"Bojack, no." Your hand wretched away from his palm, and he snapped his eyes as he looked over at you with a flair of his insistence. There was the sounds of a few people from the table muttering and giggling under their breath, and Bojakc turned his eyes over to the people behind the table, their eyes snapping up and over to the both of you as they peered over their cups and cigars. He turned his heated expression pointedly back over to you.

:You're embarrassing yourself. And, therefore, me. Very counterproductive to your romantic cause." He pressed his hand on the small of your back as he gradually begin to ease you through the crowd. Though it took you a moment of tripping over your feet to accept, you gradually began to allow Bojack to guide you; it was clear that he had reached a confident conclusion this time, and the exhaustion in his eyes was enough to make you pause in your determination. His eyes were lowered into dry exhaust, and it was clear he had reached the end of the argument.

"Nobody needs some romantic embarrassing themselves for the rest of the night. When I agreed to have a ceremony, I only agreed that I would rent a place out and invite people. I never meant to say that there would be any straightforward action of what you think would have happened. I'm sorry about that. But I'm not doing this tonight. Not until you clear your head enough to realize what you're doing."

His hand grazed the side of your shoulder, and it was clear from the action he was letting you know that this wouldn't be the end of the wrestling of the long term future; just of his patience of amusing you with your theatrics. You tripped over your feet as you attempted to keep your balance, your eyes turning over to the crowd that watched the two of you. Bojack's eyes darted to you now and then, expression lowered and resolved.

"There's no such thing as making a bad choice, anyway. Not if it all leads to the same end of the both of you knowing who you are and what you want. And there's only so many ways you can rob yourself of your humanity, anyway, when it's already promised top be inside of you."

Bojack's eyes turned to your words, and though he didn't respond, there was a sense of his own patience for you to make sense of his own decisions. Your eyes kept down, distant and compelled in consideration; Bojack's air changed to something more cautious as his eyes winced while he turend his expression forward to the crowd that was in front of the door, his eyes flaring up into a soft caution as he watched the density of the crowd that would lead to the room that was away from the bars, open floors and to the outside pools would lead him to privacy with you.

"Ok." He rolled his shoulders as he indicated you to the archway. He waved off the majority of the people, putting them off even further with a sharp roll of his eyes when one voice called out to him in an attempt to get his attention. There was no room through the dense crowd of the people who had begun to cluster through what Bojack knew was technically the cigarette and smoking room; it was the closest thing he could think of to make it so that you could have the silence of being home without the stimulation of the people around you to make you overthink your imagination.

"Excuse me. nothing remarkable going on here, keeping going on about your ways. Just taking my partner to a breakroom. Nothing worthwhile going on here."

Several people turned as they took to looking at the both of you pointedly, Bojack's awkward and shaken tone and his clumsy grin easing out and he snapped his attempt at pushing them as much as he was able through an awkward . Some of them only gazed at the two of you with that further inquiry, though the majority stepped back as they watched your body awkwardly press to the side of the edge of the crowd as your mate over to the side of the door.

"This is a good place for me to make a statement." You stopped allowing yourself to be pushed forward by Bojack, your eyes snapping up to him as he gazed at you with a tentative look of his eyes; teeth poked out. But an insult overcame his features as he watched you turn down to the ring on your finger, your fingertips trembling beside the ring as your pads began to ease it off.

"Hey." Bojack's eyes snapped as he looked around the crowd. His eyes flashed back over to you as he snapped his hand over to your palms; but this time you wretched your way back from his movement as he gave a soft hitch of his breath while he saw you wretch yourself back.

"Please let me do this." Bojack's voice was more helpless now as he gazed at you with begging eyes, voice shaken as his two hands intertangled and came beside his chest in his timid begging. His tone and air this time was just desperation, vulnerable enough as you paused, though you still kept your fingertip beside the ring, and Bojack kept snapping his eyes over to the movement of your fingertip.

(UP UNTIL THIS POINT ALL HAS BEEN COPY AND POSTED ONTO Ao3)