scent blood tainted

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There was blood everywhere. It felt like an exaggeration, a ludicrous hyperbole. But standing there in the smeared mess of what was once a perfectly pristine kitchen, it certainly was nothing of the sort. He was horrified. It was not for the sight of blood- he often saw blood- but it was soiling everything. Nyssa sobbed, a great broken spilling out of emotion. He stepped forward gingerly, over plates and bowls smashed and knives and forks with prongs and blades bent right back. Knives scattered around her, proper cleaving knives, some with blood on the handles and the edges. She looked sanguine, in both senses of the word. Her eyes were closed, and though tears tracked a clear path through the blood covering her features, she looked more peaceful than he had ever seen her. Even though she was sitting in a pool of her own blood. She moved suddenly, hitting a knife near her with the back of her hand. It spiralled across the floor, knocking other knives and pieces of plate that lay in its path until it came to a halt. It knocked, gentle, against his shoe. For a moment, he simply stared at the weapon, in apparent confusion. She lifted the hand, now bleeding from a fresh cut, and pretended to inspect it. He knew she was pretending because her eyes were still shut, eyelashes dripping blood on her cheeks. He knocked a plate with his foot and it made a grating groaning sound. She lifted her head in his vague direction, bringing the hand back to her face and licked the blood away, slow and obscene. He shivered.

The sheer amount of blood was startling. Then she looked up, eyes open and dead and unseeing and watery. He knelt beside her, pulled her up and held her tight, breathing in her familiar smell of shower products. He had bought- taken- them for her. He knew what they smelt like, but she smelt wrong. Wrong and dangerous and wild. She was different. Smelt different, hostile, her scent blood tainted. He pushed her away, suddenly unable to stand her presence. Affronted, she glared at him and then bent over at the waist, picked up a thick shard of what was once a glass. She held it tight between her palms until new blood welled up and beaded along the injury. She swiped her hands on his face, coating him in her sanguinity, and then she tried to dance away. He grabbed her hand and yanked her back to him. She thudded hard against his chest, but he ignored the protest of pain the poisoned wound made. The glass shard dropped on the floor, tinkling and spreading blood. There was a lot of blood. They made eye contact and she must have shied away from what she saw there, abruptly dropping down to the floor. She started to cry again. He swallowed hard and wished, rather selfishly, that she would stop. He went to get the first aid kit. He had been getting it more and more often, and dust no longer had time to settle over the red and white plastics. But when he returned back to her side, she shook her head and tucked her hands behind her back.

He rolled his eyes, irrepressibly angry with her and him and everything else in between. He began to clear up for a reason he could not yet understand. She blew a stray red strand out of her face and tiptoed around the kitchen, picking up and sweeping and dropping and wiping and tidying. And though she was behaving perfectly normally- for her, at least- there was a palatable and intangible feeling of wrongness about everything. Her hands were still bleeding. Every last piece of plate was swept up and bagged and put neatly in a corner, surfaces wiped down until less bloody. He turned away, disgusted, from her. There was a stifled sob, but he could not bring himself to turn around, could not bring himself to look at what he had done to her. Sebastian lifted the bags up and walked- as calmly as he could- out of the door. His back was turned to her, white t-shirt cast in a faint blue glow from the door. The door that only worked for him. That only served to infuriate her further. It took him only twenty seconds, but as he stepped back into the house, she was nowhere to be seen. He moved closer, found that she was sitting in almost the exact place he had first found her, crying and picking at her cuts. He swore, and she looked up quickly, eyes meeting him with that same hated expression of fear. He moved towards her, offered a hand. But she stood up smoothly, seeming almost surprised by her sudden grace, and left the room, silent and cautious. Drops of blood from her palms followed her path upstairs. She came down ten minutes later, hands poorly bandaged and face scrubbed clean. He did not comment on her breakdown in the kitchen. She did not deserve it. She did not deserve him, or the misfortune he had gifted her with. Her hair was still matted in places, though it was hardly noticable. He left after that, going up for a shower, carrying up the kit with him in case he needed it. He laid it on his bed and shut the bathroom door, leaning his head against the cold paned glass. His head hurt. Dried blood from Nyssa's hands transferred from his skin to the shower screen.

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