#lenore huerta 004.

[malachileclair]

DATE & TIME: February 15TH, 4:00AM LOCATION: Lenny’s Sleeper TRIGGER WARNINGS: Blood later TAG: @llenore

If you looked at him now, how sad would he appear in your eyes if you stared long enough? Does he look shriveled, leaning against the wall of the last of the sleeper car walls, does he mix into the ashes across his clothes? We don't call this hunger, we call it starvation now. We call it a throat, and a pair of lungs, and the small gods and kings he acts like live in them are still present, but clawing too, but turning into teeth. It doesn't show across his features, he can control that much, he can hold himself tall, he can a body like rooms were built around them. But what does that mean of eyes? What does that mean of voices? And in the silence of the sleeper cars, blood of Shanghai runs thin.

It feels wrong to be here, but we’ll think of this later. It’s wrong, instead he just feels it. Something new. Something like peeled skin, and no more steps he can take. (And somehow he thinks of her on a night like this, when the hallways smell of phantom smoke, and he thinks of her are hungry in a way he can’t look like predator. Compare him more to prey, to his own body, to his own fangs. He doesn’t want to say she’s safe yet, because he’s not used to the words, but he remembers her hands holding his cheeks still. He’s still here, when no place has felt safe for any of them.)

He says when he sees her shadow near the doorway, before he can see her clearly, “Were you asleep?” He didn’t knock, so he only waited there, waiting until she maybe felt him there, seems the kind of person who would, who’d notice.