After having seen all manner of new, artful concealment underneath her dress, such inviting warfare to obscure and inspire, he thought she as new when he stood up. She had squiremed in the calling kind of way and that worried him. Dumb like the willfully blind, his eyes tried to find something else in her. And then she burned like the sun was here, in Burning Bear, and inside, with them - fair skin an unprotected field for light's onslaught. Only brides blush, weddingnight or not. Why are you wearing lures, sister? You don't want to be eaten, do you? This is not your vore-age. You are made of other things than all the other brothers's sisters. You're my snowglobe ballerina. You're my laminated poem.<br/><br/>Suddenly he wasn't that large monster, aura bleeding out beyond his fur, camouflage of dead sheep's children and flower fluff dyed black like warring intent. Hadn't he been exactly his current phobia, or a thinking beast that still only wanted to do simple, beastly things to girls he rendered rosy? He knew somewhere that Reno had salted and sugared herself, thrown things in the air and run through them to make them stick, so that villains like himself would come to try and ruin. While it was a point of strength and satisfaction for some of the better composed and practiced adventurers he'd raided with and on, with Reno it was a flare in the night from an ocean that should have been empty. Here I am. It is imperative that you see me and come. The rest, she might not be sure of.<br/><br/>A brother should have lost a bit of his heart. He should have said something that let her keep all of the masks she was playing with - around her thighs, covering but not really her breasts, over and around her innocent and beckoning cunt - while also nullifying her need for them. My arms are yours, and you don't need to show skin for them. Maybe there was a bit of that in the way he looked her over, awed at the same time as he was being afraid of what he saw. Volk wanted to understand her morbid assumption, but he meant to be disgusted, too, not with her supposed misunderstanding of his plans when breathing wetly just above her womanhood, but with her situation for teaching her that. Like she'd not had to live a certain kind of life without him.<br/><br/>But if he understood all that, lighthouse eyes seeing all on the island it governed, he would have to b so insightful as to reading himself, too. And the inward truth was that he rooted for the killers that serialized the mayhem of lilting, rowed up hearts like Reno's. A menace, he'd ran around with girls who'd come to thrive in the city lights just like him. The mountains had made him romantic, and the things he said and acted out were exactly like porchlight, and their dreams were powdered wings. Hadn't he eaten them by the fistful? It was a mercy to be all-encompassing, because it was worse if you were selective about their parts. Love by way of liver, or childhood memories of a man who'd care so much he'd lace your shoes. He'd eaten their precious, protected muscles out of their flailed ribs, sometimes while their true lovers had to watch. Sensetive boy from fog-land, come to the concrete stage to feast on girls from other forests.<br/><br/>He felt it now, without giving it real audience, the group, the feral horde of wolfs that pushed around the old affections he had for young sister. Eat her too. Look, she's telling you how to open the pen, she's laying down and pretending to sleep. Maybe she could see it in the hopeless low of his shoulders, the kind of gate a predator wears when its hungry, and is willfully forgetting how to claw and rend. It was right there when she blushed. How does Reno moan? Does she like it a certain way? He knew all her complexes. He could probably turn her into a sobbing banquet.<br/><br/>But sympathy had its renaissance, when his jacket was off and she apologized. It was at once all the things the cutting teeth wanted, and the brother needed. Out of the pit he'd throw them both in. Ah, he saw it, there, the girl who couldn't be a woman, mustn't be thought of as one. Silly outfit, playing around in mother's closet. Nevermind that bare feet meant she couldn't run, and an empty house couldn't help her when she protested. He accepted the bedding with a slow nod, and let her escape. But even though he loved her as he should, for some horrible reason his arm came up to swipe at her, gracing the ends of her hair when she turned and left. She'd worn such a deep red that he'd wanted to try the temperature of her skin. And wear her in solid places. He'd always like to bully her. What if he dragged her to the forest now and they played pagan games until she froze?<br/><br/>It was easy to know what he should do next. Looking around at every room that called for his labor, the son had work. He found other things here, scrambling to collect rags and chemicals and even a mop. It was healing, to finally Do. He chased her little footfalls with water, and wiped in the wake of his own pursuing  feet. Here, where mother had stood, looking at the three of them putting together that furniture. Reno had sat on this table, casually rebelling against what father would say, if he came into the room. It was bad for Volk's back, this familiar bandit breathing through his bandanna on for the dust, but it was good for everything else.<br/><br/>Volk went mad for it. This could be something again. He uncovered life, and cried a couples of times when he lost himself to the hours. His mascara was gray. Little treasure pockets of tools that he could use to dig out some dignity for their home. Reno had seen the bad things, but Volk hadn't been there for love's decay. He was freshly naive about the walls and the ceilings. He put his nails in the cracks and crevices, and he crawled in awkward ways to find the hiding filth. She'd not even covered the bigger pieces to save them from the air-borne granulates. Silly girl.<br/><br/>It was a strange joy, finally tending to anxiety. Oh, he knew it was decades too late, and that he'd not be saving anyone in particular but maybe himself. But this wasn't nothing anymore. This was excruciatingly small, but it was his. The Wicker Boy had come home, and in the carcass of it, he was excavating penance. How could he ever stop? Somewhere inside the night, Reno might hear laughter. It was the ghost finding his lungs again, where the tar of cigarettes and grains of dust couldn't reach.<br/><br/>In the morning he'd be there, just up the stairs, some marauder come for her room, his jeans with real rips in them now, filthy faded, and his shirt touched by the same pale signs of his nightly, gratifying fight. None of the blankets, just the boy, curled up slightly with his hand out, and rag just barely in the open fingers. The bandana was still there, for some reason tied around his head and hair instead of his mouth, woman's lips lax in his abyssal slumber. Was that a smile or an upward streak of filth?<br/><br/>If she wanted to plague herself she could pull back to when he'd promised to make things better, and then leave. Perhaps the smile was for that. Or maybe when she'd gone to her little homely place, he'd been born into something new, something she'd known between five and eight o'clock. He certainly looked it, harbinger of moderately clean surfaces. It was clear, anyhow, that lamplight and morning sun stayed a little better throughout their castle, now.<br/><br/>Somewhere else in the town that had not thrived in the absence of their prince who'd coveted and laid his queen, a once contender had stayed awake. His rumblings had died out with fatigue, but the glittering cans around his boyhood room was proof that violent skinship on the screen and all manner of caffeine and burning waters could keep you up and with the worlds fog, but in your head. Collin was part of Volk's life before he'd excuse himself and gone to babysit when the day was just starting. In a way he'd always waited and grown with the weeds like Reno. He'd even tried to be that brother, jumping up and down for her to see him, and then laughing when she wanted the lights off.<br/><br/>It seemed more acute now, that he come to that house, when someone was there who'd put up pictures of his own neon gnarled nights with every emissary the big city threw at him on an account Collin would never admit to obsessing over. It was sick, of course, that he'd wanted something out of the damned Wicker Boy too, son of a literal whore, but there it was, the opened gyre. He'd not slept sweetly, for however shortly, after having tripped over a vat of redemption in sweet sister's house. Not even when he'd been there, vying to do things on the screen to her too. He only got to do some, and that had been by his own physical insistence, mostly. They'd not been that kind of friends in a minute. It was wrong that she should fraternize with Volk though, who people had seen turn into Burning Bear, Collin's Burning Bear, on something sleek and expensive.<br/><br/>Quiet clapping at the unfortunate and almost certainly miserable girl who screamed her lungs bloody in Collin's headphones. It wasn't an unusual morning, with its deep smells and joyful malice simply because the bar had to have closing hours, too, but it had a new tilt, today. He drank and quietly drowned his own fingers. The pleasure that climbed him was menial, and he had a boy in mind, instead of the lashed and hung up woman on pause at the end of the clip. At least she'd seen the last of her punishments. Collin was  going to indulge in his.