#minlu.......................yes

The woman gazes at him, with those dark eyes and that dark hair spilling over her shoulders when she leans a nearer, when her head dips.  The movement is odd; at once too fast and too smooth, doll dancing where muscles should be jerking, body breaking and looking elegant while it does.  The morality Luella does not cling to but which still makes a home in her chest — however much some of Beckett’s associate mock — sings like a plucked string, an out of tune reminder that monster is a better word for her than any.

(  and every step i take takes me further from heaven. )

Her head dips further, eyes to hands, pictures blood staining those long nails.  Then her eyes raise, and she smiles.  “If you were to ask most of my kind, they’d ask you to clarify — do you mean actual people, or kine?”  After all, so few Kindred count the humans as people; cattle, as the name goes.  She likes to think she is better than that.  Some days, it’s even true.  “I try to remember that the humans are people, hard as it often is.”

It’s not an answer.  She doesn’t have a good one.  Luella hums beneath her breath, small hands extending to take his face gently between her fingers.  She imagines cracking his skull — inelegant, but she’s no Toreador — or boiling his blood, and doesn’t.  She tries to remember that humans are people.  With him, it’s easier.  His blood hums beneath her fingers, and she leans nearer, as though the pair might kiss.

(  is there a heaven? / i’d like to think so.  )

“I’ve killed too many to count,” she breathes, scarcely an inch between their mouths.  “But, if it comforts you, largely only those who sought to kill me first.”  She thinks of the blood dolls within the Sabbat hideout, all mangled and dark and kept - alive for cruelty’s sake.  “Or as a mercy.”