dagger-hearted, silver-lipped

It seemed that both of their demons would be haunting them that evening.

Her room in the Scarab altered into a smaller thing, closing in on itself and the red-rosed girl as she lounged and flipped through pages of contacts she once knew. Some were dead. Others merely slipped so deep into gnashing and rasping shadows that they morphed into a part of them, unable to tear themselves away from the sweet siren call of darkness, held so tightly in their embrace that it became increasingly apparent that they might never resurface. She was like them, save for the minute details; she wasn't in so deep, she knew how to separate herself before she, too, got lost in their guttural songs and swaying promises of greater things. Greater, she would have scoffed. They could offer her nothing she couldn't take for herself save the sense of peace of finally being free--if falling off the deep end of the ocean gave anyone the redemption they were looking for.

And so she sat and flipped, name after name either homeless or adrift in the lands as her own had been. While time passed and told her it had only been a couple of months, her mind stretched itself thin and screamed inside the confines of her skull: enough. She was ready to end the hiding, to go dance back into the arms of reality and face all she had missed. Too many moons passed, too many empty nights, accomplishing nothing. She wanted change, she begged for the monotony of sticking to shadows to end, she desired to bathe beneath the sun's lips... and she yearned for the saccharine taste of the hunt, the only satisfaction she knew to quell the madness raging in a too-insipid heart.

Then a moon rose that saw her diamond-plated face.

It was over, and she was let loose to subdue the rage once more.

The Scarab had grown too quiet, her room too modest for claws that needed flexing. She craved more than the mundane increasingly scrawled out names. Abandoning the pocketbook, retiring from her rose-painted room, the ghostly girl tread through dim hallways. Room after room hung back, somber without their occupants, including Vikander's with door cracked. Shock blossomed in her breast as technicolor eyes wavered over his chamber (it was never left open, never with his cloak hanging left behind, never...) and she worried. A usually cool, calm heart pounded lightly against blood-stained ribs as she brashly grabbed the robe and demanded from the nearest patron of the Scarab where he headed.

Outside of the bustling Night Court Marketplace, his broad tracks were easy to follow in the falling snow. If he was going to leave, she at least would make sure the cold wouldn't kill him; that would be too dishonorable of a death.

Her room had grown too small for a seething soul and so she would find someplace bigger for it. The ground opened wide and swallowed her whole, just as it had done to the black spectral body of Vikander. She spotted him, a pinprick of an onyx mass amid the rest of the darkness, and it was no wonder to her that he wandered there. She hadn't seen him since her return to the surface, and perhaps it wouldn't have been wrong of her to assume he grew madder with the passing suns. The voices in his head became a cacophony that spilled over into their world; he spoke back to them, but she said nothing while she approached with his coat gathering snow as she advanced. She didn't care if he noticed her or not, small-framed figure gliding to stand beside him. The fabric she pulled from his suite was gently laid across his back--his back that was almost white from the flurries soon to encase them all.

Manon didn't look at him. She looked out instead at the breadth of the lake frozen over, a winter wonderland that, perhaps on a better day, she would have dared to skate through to feel the thrill of something other than her mind cracking beneath her. The last of Vik's words had long been lain to rest when she finally made her voice break between the lines that threaded together to create them. "My room was too small." Words that didn't belong there, a speech that seemed to shatter the fine serenity that made home for the night against his shoulders.

Her crystals and necklace shone a beacon to deserted thoughts much like his own pendant.

Their demons were out to play under the radiance of the moon.

Nights are numb, days are dead
Tried to fix you, broke myself instead