So here's that other fiction piece I mentioned -- a dialogue of sorts that has been more/less repeated multiple times in the course of my life. People say they'll come back, that we'll remain in contact, but no one ever does. Why would they? I am not welcome or pleasant company. Anyway, enjoy...

Incapability and Inevitability
(perhaps to spawn The Catacombs?)

"I would tell you that I love you," he snorted, "if I were capable of the emotion."

"What are you saying? You are capable of anything that you believe you are capable of," she told him.

"Then I do not believe that I am capable of 'love.'"

"If you are truly certain that you are not capable of loving anyone, then, why do you feel the need to tell me such things? Why do you confide in me, and no one else? Do you not believe in our relationship -- whatever it is -- either?"

She beheld him playfully, but with a distant gravity in her gaze: uncertainty. She wasn't sure how he would answer her, and feared his reply.

"Oh, you are a dear one. I have great respect for and have grown quite fond of you. But I would think the same of anyone who saw fit to favor me with her attention; it just so happens you are the only one who has ever done so..."

"Others will come..."

"...but even this will not last."

"What are you saying?"

"Our time together is at its end. You will go back to your full life, and live that full life to the fullest, and never once will you think back upon the time you spent with me here in the catacombs. Or, if some fond memory should brave its way through the thick of whatever enjoyment your life affords you to spend a moment in your working memory before again being swallowed up, I am certain that I shall be absent from all contemplation. Whatever happens, I am certain that we shall never meet again. Not here, not elsewhere, nor in reminiscence."

He sighed and lowered his head, peering dejectedly at the harsh, unforgiving granite floor.

"How silly you are, but your pessimism depreciates the humor that would otherwise drench your words. My sweet cynic, I could never forget you."

She placed a hand on his shoulder. He tensed the warmth of her touch at first, then relaxed, gradually. He lifted his face to her hand and kissed it gingerly.

"You speak with such charm and accuse me of doing the same, but my truth is harsh and unfortunate," he said. "And unfortunate it is, but also true, and you may not intend for it to happen, but it will be so. It has always been this way, and so must it always be. I am damned and doomed to forever suffer. You alleviate my suffering. Thus you cannot be allowed to stay, and the slight must be of the worst kind. You will not leave me because you are taken from me. You will leave of your own accord, simply put, because you have 'better things to do.'"

"How you can accuse me of such things and claim that you might love me, were you capable of loving! To think that I could abandon one so dear! Your cynicism borders on insulting," she said in a display of feigned anger, rubbing his shoulder with consoling strokes as the false bitterness left her lips.

"Take with you my sincerest apologies, then, as you leave my miserable world forever."

"Stop this. If I did not care for you, then why would I speak to you?"

"You had lost your way and found yourself detained here, in my dwellings, in the catacombs. I sought you out and, during your stay, you might actually have enjoyed yourself," he answered without hesitation. "But do not think I am not aware of how you suffered here. The bitterness of your experiences here, and the revulsion with which you spoke of this wretched place ? I overheard. And to think that you should return for any reason, especially to see me, is unimaginable..."

"Hush..."

"...but I cannot blame you. I would not stay here either, were I not bound to the infernal halls."

"..."

"Nothing to say, have you?"

"The time has come, and now I must go," she said sadly.

"So it begins."

"I do not wish to leave you like this."

"You will, and you must, because it must be so. I must be alone, left to inhale the stench of rotting dreams and banana peels. I must be left alone to break stale fortune cookies and bleed from cavernous wounds as the reproaches within leave wide gashes in flesh and reach to marrow cores. And I must be left to wonder how happy you will be with others more worthy of your time, and to rattle my chains while cursing whatever things are responsible for my existence that I could not be like those whom you so adore. Go now, with whatever love I am capable of."

"I must, but hear me well. I shall return, and we shall talk of literature and film and bake brownies and write our own fortunes together."

He tried not to smile at her, but the faintest hope tugged at the corners of his mouth and managed to draw them up a bit, but his sadness yet permeated the expression -- he couldn't have looked more pitiful had he been flailing about, or weeping.

"Would that it could be so."

The gate opened with an exasperated creak, and he watched her tall, curvaceous frame stride off towards the darkness until it enveloped her and he could see her no more, and then he listened to the tapping of her footsteps along the ancient stone floor of the labyrinth until he could hear them no more. And then he turned away from the punishing silence and commanding darkness of his solitude to a place deep within himself, sliding through flesh, piercing bone, and riding the flow of marrow to whatever ichor fills the soul hollows. There he beheld her beauty once more, and listened to the melodic tone of her voice as she spoke of all manner of things, and there he stayed until time began to gnaw at even these fondest memories. When he could see her no more, and hear her no more even here, the spirit broke and bled from his eyes until the veins emptied themselves. And there he sat, in that puddle of love lost, and watched, alone, as maggots surfaced from unknown crevices and swam about in the obscurity of it all. The writhing white pills parted the murky waves, lapping greedily at the cherished memories until the floor of the cell was dry once more.

That's it. Ja.