#bhscw

    His hands can easily be enclosed in mine. But how can something fit so perfectly in a world as imperfect as this one? It's a dream, I think. Yes. When his hands are sleeping in a cave made of my unsure skin- unmoving, slowly breathing, dormant- that's how I know it's a dream. But it's a bubble that traps time and shields against the rest of the world. 

    Like your teddy bear- the one you had when you missed your parents, but you had to sleep in your own bed. And I can feel the incomprehensible thing that is life breathing through his hands. It floats inside the cave as specs of dust do in a forgotten old house. And it's the temperature of the water that fills the bathtub after a long day, but now- now, you can finally relax without worrying about whatever lies beyond the bathroom door. You can save that for a little later. 

    When I raise my hands, his follow without complaint. Right now, his hands are not flipping the pages of a book, or break-dancing on top of one. They're not holding a pencil, refusing to make any artistic marks on a paper, because "I don't know how." They're not in anyone else's hands. They're here, in mine. We're together. This is home.

Three men stood at the end of a riverside peer. One was short, plump, with a black bag over his head. He looked as if he had been drug out of bed in the middle of the night. The other two were dressed in black, one short and lean, the other tall and broad-shouldered.

eyed man tipped him gently into the river with his boot, and the body began to float slowly downstream.

”

black eyes were fixed hungrily on the body floating downstream, now barely a smudge of grayish white against the dark water.

The tall man elbowed Kalden in the side sharply, snapping him out of his fugue. Kalden hissed irritably at Miré, who looked at him warningly. “Don’t even think about it. That body has to be intact for the police to find, so we get our payday when our employers hear about it. Can’t have you ripping him all to hell before that.”

”

Kalden nodded eagerly, stomach growling. “But first,” he replied reluctantly, “we have to take care of everything.”

His partner murmured an affirmative, pulling away from Kalden and starting back up the path towards the car they had stolen to get there. Kalden, meanwhile, put a light illusion over the bloody knife, enough to mask it from any mortals who happened to cross it’s path, and chucked it as hard as he could upriver. It landed a few miles away on a bridge, startling several nearby pigeons. Kalden nodded satisfiedly and briskly ran in the direction of the car.

When he got there, Miré was still enchanting the car, muttering under his breath and gesturing vaguely, eyes closed. Kalden stayed back from the car so as not to distract him; the spell he was weaving was meant to cause an explosion that would destroy the car once they had left, and he didn’t want to get caught in the blast if Miré misstepped in the middle of it.

His foot twitched as he watched Miré, impatient to go find something to eat. After a few more trying moments, the tall assassin straightened up, saw Kalden, and tilted his head at him inquiringly.

“Ready to hunt?” he asked.

Kalden growled and bared his teeth, eyes glittering darkly with anticipation. “Oh, yes.”