“We used to be cannibals. It’s really as simple as that. There isn’t any good point to keeping up this facade that we’re anything else.” Unending dark red eyes remained unchanged as the words slipped from between sharp tipped canines. “That’s how this whole trouble blossomed.”

“I’m no cannibal, Damien.” A younger figure snapped back. His knife blade golden eyes pierced the air as he glared at the other man.

“Oh? Truly? Do you not eat people, essentially? Do you not marvel in the way the taste can simply overtake you and how lush it feels after every drink? Having a conscience about it is just a self-destructive trait. You hate yourself, is my guess. There’s no other reason why you still cling to such trifle things as feeling.” Damien took a step forward, head tilting to one side in what could have been mistaken for a curious manner. “Then again, I suppose that what keeps me enthralled in you. If that went away, you’d be just another shattered doll in the trash heap, boring and broken. I wonder which part would break first.”

When Damien took his first step, the golden eyed boy almost took a faltering step back but stopped himself before the foot left the ground completely. “You want to know why I don’t let go? Because, I have people I care for more than just myself, people who would be put through hell if I let myself slip away. So even though it hurts, I refuse to become inhumane like you.” As the words flowed, they grew more confident until the boy stood taller and his eyes locked unfalteringly with the red ones.

“A thing more confounding you would be hard-pressed to find. Stephen, you truly are an enigma to me.” Damien pause and took a deep breath before a wolfish smile ebbed it’s way onto his lips. “But one thing you know only half as much as you wish. You are as baffled by me as I am by you.”

“Really, care to elaborate? I’m pretty sure that I have you well figured for an emotionless sociopathic murderer for sport.” Stephen growled, his hands curling into fists at his side.

“Do you care at all for a good tale?” Damien spoke softly, inches away from Stephen’s face and the grin still snaking along his face.

“Not really but if you have to then go.” The golden eyed boy watched the other as a mouse watches a cat.

“There once was a two people who were very much in love. The man was a kind and loyal man. The woman was the same but she had one fault. Everything she loved always perished. As a small child she watched her father kill her family and then himself. After that, everything she planted withered away into brown husks and animals turned into maggot infested carcasses. But this did not. The man continued to live. But one day she filled his tea cup with poison and placed it in front of him and said with a deeply loving smile, ‘Here is poison a cup of poison just for you.’ And he smiled back at her and thanked her before drinking the cup and beginning his route to decomposition. It’s plain to me why the man drank the poison, and you?” The grin was still there but it seemed to almost be viewed through a dirty pane of glass.

Stephen stood stock still, lost for words. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and his mind spun. Slowly, though, a thought form and he took a deep rattling breath. Slowly he locked gazes with wayward eyes. “He knew that she wouldn’t do it out of malic, it would be out of…madness.”