8 |✓

Seven | He lost her to vices

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She was gorgeous - the girl who stole hearts on the silver screen. She was living the Hollywood dream. She loved the attention, she craved adoration.

She was an unwanted child born out of wedlock, stuck with a drunkard of a parent. When her mother passed she was free from the stench of liquor, but was tied to an unforgiving life nonetheless, no love and barren. 

She hopped from one foster home to another; she was poor and hapless. All things changed when a black-hatted man found her. She shot to fame, went from zero to a million-dollar Hollywood sensation. 

She was so enamoured by the dazzle; she couldn't even see that it ate her raw.

* * *

He was plain. He spent half his life hidden behind cameras, capturing moments for others. He spent the other half huddled in his red room, developing photographs. He loved his vocation, and it was his picture of her that led her to damnation.

His job, then and after, was to capture a smile on her flawless appearance. 

He watched her movies. 

He watched her pick up weed, he watched her get wasted. He watched her totter home with different men on rotation. 

Everyone knew her name, but few knew her. 

And he? He knew her for sixteen years, but he wasn't sure he did any longer. Perhaps he mattered to her, perhaps once upon a time before she was who she was. 

He strove hard to forget her, to reclaim the piece of him he gave to her. 

Could he? 

He did, ten years later. 

He married and started a family; she changed partners as her heart desired. 

But could there be everlasting fame? Never. 

At age 30, the young ones start to take her place. She became angry and jealous. She became empty and battered. 

She sought him out again, after all this while. 

"Please, would you take one more photograph of me?" 

He relented.

The next day, news went wild. 

Former Hollywood Darling Found Dead at Home.

Suicide, they say. Over-intoxication. 

But he knew, clear, that what took her was more - it was a soul tainted by the demon's infiltration.