My mouth is red and sticky with blood. No, not blood. Lipstick, crimson and wet, a moist, warm gash. The illusion vanishes, and I ache. This is why I never wear red lipstick. My mouth in the tiny compact mirror hurts me, plagues me with memories that never happened, makes a phantom flavor burn upon my tongue--a flavor that I am all too familiar with, but tasted in another time, another form that should have existed and does not. I set the mirror aside and put my mouth to my wrist, lick at the blood trickling down my skin, probe my tongue at the clean, metal-tasting edges of the freshly-slashed wound. He watches me, dark eyes hungry, and I put my teeth to his throat.

He growls, and threads his blood-sticky fingers through my already-tangled hair, the sharpened tips of his painted and ichor-caked nails catching in the soft ebon strands and tugging at them painfully. I give him a swift, sharp, animalistic nip of retaliation, and then my nails are stroking his jugular, my canines are at the soft flesh of his neck, sinking deep into yielding muscle and releasing a corrupted fountain upon my tongue, the flavor of dark life and something dank and mouldering and sweetly, warmly rotting.

We grapple at each other hungrily, and he twists around me, and we snap at each other like rabid dogs, lips parted, my nerve and bone canines to his prosthetics, the sweet, wet flavor of our mouths running down our chins, flowing between our mouths, staining our skin with diluted pink and making delicious-smelling wet clumps in our loose-streaming hair. Blood from my wrist smears his chest like the meaty gore of dying, and I tear away from lapping at his jaw and attack the fresh scarlet with a snarl; flavors mingle, my essence and his skin and our hot man-animal scents all running together into one obscene font of night-bound bloodlust.

A fresh wound blossoms upon my neck like a gaping mouth vomiting blood and crushed rose petals; the pain is hot, glowing, but razor-edged porcelain is cold and wet upon my raw, exposed nerves as he savages me. Our naked bodies coil like those of wanton serpents, like those of whippet-thin, supple and thrashing wolves of emaciated inhumanity. We are wild, growling, beasts who have forgotten their human natures and know only the desire to tear and rend, claws aching to rake aside barriers of flesh to find truth of being in the soft pinkness of exposed, glistening entrails. When he snaps at my fingers, I howl and snarl and slash my talons at his heart, but he bites them, over and over again, gnawing like a mountain cat with a flesh-trailing, cracking bone, sucking at my bloody skin. I see crimson, nothing but crimson, and his eyes glow with it as we stare each other down, feral smiles of wetly gleaming bestiality a challenge, a promise of death; I imagine his flesh peeling and exploding away in ribbons laced with scarlet.

We could hunt like this, yes--hunt and kill together, falling with our sibilant hisses upon our victims and kissing the breath, the blood, the terror, the life from their throats with our teeth and feeding as we are meant to, feeding as we need to to quench the hurtful, burning, acidic hunger that grows stronger every night. "Adrien...." he hisses gleefully, sanguine fluid trickling from one corner of his beautiful pink-and-tan mouth, his clenched-teeth grin like a Death's-head, and my mind is so fogged with the blood-madness that I barely recognize the crackling syllables of my own name; I am Adrien no longer, but some thing without a name, brother and lover and father and twin to this depraved creature before me. He is the most exquisite thing that I have ever seen, with his dark brown hair disarrayed aesthetically and sweeping his scarlet-streaked shoulders and his wild, wild eyes tinged with the same demon-red that drips from his white, white canines and paints his soft, soft lips.

The blood that trickles and courses over his slashed and clawed and gnawed skin of velvety naked mocha makes me hungrier, hungrier than even the pulsing pinkness of exposed flesh, and I want to fall on him again, want to be his victim, want him to be mine. Then we are upon each other once more, gripping and snapping and growling, biting and licking and sucking and joining and screaming with each lance of ecstatic, thrusting, rhythmic pain, blood and human salt mingling into the most perfect flavor of all, settling warm in our bellies until finally we fall still.

Placated we are, yes.....but sated, satisfied we will never be, not until we can hunt, can tear and rend and rip, can kill--and even as we settle into drifting, cloying silence, we still trail our fingers in the spatters of crimson and white and mixed-pink and lick them from our skin, picking at the edges of a hunger that will never go away. As we drift into sleep, my mouth is red and sticky with blood.