...all I do is give; am I wasting my time?

She hated it. She hated the way she couldn't stop staring. She hated the little lies she told herself, the way she built up walls, fabrications, something woven around her heart to keep out the blackness she couldn't avoid.

She couldn't avoid watching, waiting, expecting something sinister to happen.

And it always did, inevitably. Something scary always reared its ugly head, snapped sharp teeth around her throat, and hauled her down somewhere, somewhere that even her screams couldn't be heard.

She hated what she loved.
She loved what she hated.

"Why won't you just leave me alone?" she asked the cold, cruel, unkind jut of the stag before her; he was the last bastion of madness here, it seemed, stabbing into the sky with his glorious crown.

The Beast lilted, leaned, loomed over her, and even when he was close, her eyes watered at the smell of him. He smelled like the beginning of life, the end of the world: sex and offal, life and afterbirth, the rotting of corpses in some fetid swamp.

"Because you do not want me to, do you? Because you hate me."

And even as he laughed, she heard herself laughing with him, pathetic sounds bubbling up out of her throat, a morass of madness that seeped and writhed down the walls of her mind.

Even as she laughed, she felt like screaming, and even as she started screaming, she felt like singing.

Oh, the chorus she would sing, a sound to highlight the rasp of his voice in her ears, spinning, spiraling, spilling off his tongues.

"Because you love me."