#yellowfingcr

“-Ah! Gods. My apologies. Sometimes it happens. Generally not so out of blue, but- guess today is special.”

Her voice answers the call of his memory. Less deliberate is the way his thoughts conjure her picture, the notes of her semblance arranged into a new melody. At its centre lies the sight of her blood falling to her own lips, the tangible descent playing in his mind with the punctual insistence of a pendulum.

The hunter’s coat, the fangs guarding her words, the absence of her lenses and the shorter locks of her hair. Many are the differences, none as concisely meaningful as that crimson trail. Warm, living, shared by man and beast, as close to the earth as the cobblestone roads it spills over. He can almost smell the scent, the potent iron, less moon-scented than many.

He can. He can smell it. He's been carrying it since then. And moved by the spell that compels people to make truth truer still, he reaches into his pocket. From it he pulls the handkerchief, still marked in sanguine, proof of the act. His other hand draws closer to the item bearing the caution of someone holding a glasspiece, and his fingers press into the phantom wound, the stain just as evident to the touch.

His eyes fall upon the streets, then lift to the clouds. A veil is pulled over him, formed by the span of his shoulders and the brim of his hat, and in that lone secrecy he parts his mouth. In his own breath, upon the bed of his serpentine tongue, he tastes in the air the fabric of her blood. In it he tastes more than Heysel.

The bell tolls, the howls sound in the distance. Cayin kneels to grab his cane before he turns to his next destination, handkerchief held tight.

"Do you trust me?" She's smiling cutely and all.

"Of course I do, my friend.

You never gave me any reason to, after all."

Granted, she can be... quite a lot to deal with, every now and then. A Hunter many could consider particular. Quirky. Sometimes, he'd argue a little too playful and daring, especially when it comes to their past talks and her tendency to tease him, be they on purprose or by accident.

But he trusts her. She's a bright star in the ever growing darkness that plagues Yharnam, one that, despite everything, still makes him chuckle a bit.

"But don't think you can use this trust to do anything more ridiculous than... whatever you do in the woods, young lady."

To think, there had been a time before Brom knew what it was to love so hungrily and carnally as this. In those days before when faith and so-supposed holiness had been used time and again to excuse his excesses, to enable the drowning of each and every sense of his beneath the good blood every moonlit night, he had truly been all but a wanton beast ever in search for more flesh. Bitten by the gleaming edge of his silver sword raised in zealous bloodshed, flayed apart beneath the curving of fingers turned cruel claws and even greedily swallowed by a maw sharpened by Oedon's touch, the flesh and meat of those of whom he had sworn to defend had been his to slake hunger and thirst with-- and it had never been enough. Not even when his sight had begun to falter as brown eyes fell apart and began to gleam by lantern's light, not even when his jaw fractured to better accommodate that hunger; a hunger known not by mere men, those whom he had time and again condemned for their supposed weakness as though he were not the epitome of all the Healing Church's wicked, debased indulgences.

It took the willful succumbing of each and every brother-in-arms he'd had for him to awake to the wretched thing he'd become. It took Heysel for him to do more than seek out death alone to atone for that; to rise from the ruin he'd long made of himself with the intention to become someone worthy of his silver sword. Someone worthy of the way she looked at him, smiled at him as though he were the sun coming to break the day over Yharnam once more, touched him as if he were something prized and oh-so worthy of keeping and cherishing.

Someone worthy enough to behold her as Brom does now. Heysel arches into his sharp affections, wields him to satiate her own need against the press of his knee, and the sounds she makes beneath the press of his maw will carry him through a hundred hunts. Heady already from the taste of her sweat-slick skin, the cloying scent of her wet cunt threatens to unmake him, and the press of his own hips against hers as they grind against one another for delicious friction makes it clear that his own arousal is more than prepared to meet her.

There's something like thunder that echoes from deep within his broad chest as she pries them apart, a growl of protest half-turned to a whine as their mouths part. Those tattered eyes of his are blown wide, burning fervently as Brom pants and allows his claws to sink deeper into the supple flesh of her rear as if in animal intent to ensure she doesn't escape. She teases, aye she teases! Even now when the scent of her arousal has reached a new height, even when her own need lies so plainly upon her face, his beloved finds it in herself to jest and make merry. It would be enough to make him laugh in that way he could never among his fellow hunters or the clergy, in the way that makes it clear he's a man yet rather than the wolfish thing he sees in the mirror.

It would, had Brom not been so thoroughly wound with tension and need by her own keen hand. This won't go unpunished.

"How lax of me. How-- hah, how irresponsible." Brom allows the length of his tongue to slip from his parted maw, gaze set firmly on Heysel's eyes as it slithers around her wrist before slowly coiling back, just lapping at her knuckles. "Danger abounds here. Between the beasts and... and ne'er-do-wells alike." There's a non-too subtle squeeze to her ass, and Brom hums in something like thought but sounds like the promise of an earthquake beneath the weight of his hunger. "I ought to... to check. Can never be too careful."

Without warning, Brom's claws tears through her trousers as though they're paper even as he claims her charming mouth once more. His kiss is harsh, the press of teeth against her lips and the coiling of his tongue around her own intent on leaving her utterly breathless lest her words unmake him before they even touch. My perfect Brom. His cock throbs against her as he snarls, tugging her bottom lip between his fangs before a hand settles over her breast and presses her firmly against the tree.

"Don't move." As though an eager adherent to the faith, Brom drops to his knees and breathes out a shaky breath against the exposed flesh of her thighs. "I'll need to-- godsdamn me, I'll need to search you." His clawed hands, roughened from years of fighting the horrors of the Yharnam night, smooth down her thighs as he hums. "No knife, no hidden pistol." Brom trails a set of claws along her inner thigh to ease her open, mouth wet with the overwhelming need to taste the need he's instilled within her. What shreds of her trousers remain are torn off remorselessly, until Heysel is left bare save for her small clothes before him.

// happy birthday! scheduled party pic for you

Ifsahan goes still for a moment. No flutter of pulse, no breath, no blink of a dark eye. "She was terribly sweet. I thought for a while that we could be friends, the way she'd creep closer when I'd rest by her gate. But that's when I still thought the bars were to protect her, not-"

They shake their head, swallow horrors. "-not to confine her. I didn't realize at first that she'd been treated with such needless cruelty."

Maimed; silenced. (Not just her; one drowned alongside her ward, another was trapped in a horrid oubliette, guarded by vicious dogs. It did not have to be so.)

"Her faith was beyond my understanding. How she's stayed sane at all-" For she had, for who knows how long. Holy woman for a sacred fire.

"I tried to be kind to her. It was the only way I could make her burden easier, her soul lighter."

And what a soul she had, impossibly rich with humanity, impossibly bright despite everything. What undead could fail to sense it? What hungry soul could fail to crave it?

// You are so, so extremely sweet. You show me so often and so clearly just how much you care, and the fact that you still go out of your way to show me more kindness is only one of many, many things that make me feel grateful for your friendship. I'm so glad you love what I do, and I again feel very fortunate for that because I love the what you do, the way you are and what we've been doing over the years.