There has been an accident on Bottlenose Boulevard. Two bystanders watch as the authorities give their all to hide such shameful sights in the city.

These two don't loosen their knot at their elbows. They don't give any clues that they are ideal candidates for the ongoing witness accounts. They'd rather share a very thoughtful moment in this chaos.

This is where Dana died, or so the wind heard. In acknowledgement, the flames curb their frenzy, and they're finally giving in to the water.

A hollow sigh, that's all Itvara can budge as an answer. She steps an inch closer to Dana's arm, to make way for the authorities. More police tape encircles the area, and they get asked to move out of the way for investigations. Not that they still felt the need to get closer.

They leave the crime scene as silently as they entered it. Excluding the recently charred building, this street loves posing as pristine, as a home to luxury storefronts and tempting neons. Beyond these, it also hides rumours of slippery alleyways and dubious nests. It's an exuberant display of the city's economy, in both of its extremes. What ties it all together is that everyone's got goods and services.

While walking on their set way, Itvara has to give regular updates of the perimeters they find themselves into. Not only for indications, but also to keep Dana's legs moving, to pull her for the last mile. It was tough keeping her engaged when all she directs is keep forwards.

This area of Inkopolis isn't as vibrant as Itvara assumed it'd be from her first minutes upstairs. She guesstimates they've been waking north this entire time, as the distance to suburban Inkopolis grows shorter with their steps. Each residential block has only one or two apartments with lights still lit. There isn't a single business still open at this hour. For Itvara, the idiom always darkest before dawn gains its literal sense for the first time.

Dana adds eventually, with no prompt: "Apartment 702."

"Huh?"

"We're in the right place," she points to the rougher concrete under their feet. Once they climb the flight of stairs to 702, she lifts the door mat to find a taped key under it.

The days come full circle for Dana, once she unlocks her apartment's door and remembers the disarray, the clutter, the amassed possessions.

A floor lamp immediately greets them in front of the entrance, guarding the side of a closet. The two squeeze through the door and into the 16 square metres dwelling. To the left is the kitchen, connecting to the bathroom. To the right is the bed. Nothing more.

Her bed is exactly as she left it: resting next to the wall, under the half-opened window, with the sheets bunched up next to the pillows. The floors haven't been vacuumed. A lone mug waited in the sink. A shirt's hem sticks out of the drawers opposite of the bed. The dust begins to swirl from the unexpected stir, right in front of her nose. It can't be helped. Dana carefully turns to the entrance door, and locks it twice.

It takes very few steps to see all there is to this place. Dana finishes her cautionary patrol around her apartment, then takes slow strides to the kitchen stools, pulling one from under the floating counter. Once her legs stop carrying her, they begin pulsing from base to toe, each wave alternating between feverish and frigid. She keeps the wince for herself.

On the bright side, she notes how she hasn't bumped on anything, how she got the keyhole on her second try. The time spent in a place never seem to rub off, no matter where you end up later on.

"Home," Dana whispers with her hands behind her neck, in disbelief.

In disbelief that she made it, and that she's calling the box she tried to escape a home. She gets an itch that comes up only when getting onto something incredibly important, though she's too exhausted to follow that train of thought. Her vision falls on the white tentacles.

Right after entering, Itvara has since frozen up next to the floor lamp, which is about her height. It's hard to tell which is the bulb enclosure, and which is the head. Instead of looking for its switch, she settled in line with the window, with an unexplainable sense of anticipation. It will not be drowned in still darkness any longer. The window's slowly pouring in pale morning light. They've not entered the apartment for long, though the cold sun decided on warming it up, peeking its glow behind the skyline. Its crown then frames itself right in the window's centre. This is her first genuine dawn.

A ball forms in the octoling's throat, nearly choking her up before she pushes it back in. The air in her chest becomes lighter than the one outside. She loses whatever's been holding her straight all this day. The running, the adrenaline and the city vapours have picked at Itvara's last reserves of energy. With a brief lean forwards, a small moment of unbalance, she collapses on the mattress.

Twenty fourteen, Mollusc Era. The town of Silvertip was left in the past a while ago, in favour of yet another crammed apartment in the neighbouring City of Colour. The ceremonial statues near Inkopolis Tower were due to a polishing. The Great Zapfish was still coiled around its rightful spire. The news were slow in late autumn.

The sky's afternoon glow crept in her room, from the very same window. It shone on her laundry on her floor, on the eyeshadow palettes on her bed, and the outlandish footwear in the corner.

It wasn't a lazy afternoon. The movement inside was fuelled by rush.

The crabling bounced around her bed on one leg, about four times, pulling on her skinny jeans' belt loops. They didn't pass her waist, though they were never meant to. A string of her underwear peeked above her hip. She covered it down with an old t-shirt, black, one size larger, whose print was beginning to crumble. It had a band logo on the front. The respective band's tour dates and locations on its back had partially peeled off and turned incomprehensible. Her orange hair pincers covered the topmost ones anyway.

Shifting from one leg to another incessantly, she picked one of her palettes and stuck her finger in one of the darker shades. The palette's thin mirror was too dusty and small to frame her properly, though she used it to tactically smear the colour over her eyelids. Her eyes were round, heavy lashed. Her tear-ducts were naturally jet black, two skinny triangles pointing towards her nostrils. Her irises managed to be an even deeper black, which absorbed the inbound light. She was missing an inkling's characteristic mask, despite being half one. She was also missing her professional brushes, but she blurred the eyeshadow to the same high standard with her finger. Her shop would classify her bold look as one for a big night out. Bullshit, it fit any hour.

Her pacing was brought to a halt when she spotted a vast collection of mugs forming on the various surfaces in her studio. Her dark gradient claws balanced multiple mug handles towards the kitchen. The dirty mugs were left with the rest of the dishes, piling up mercilessly as the weekend approached. Dana gave them a look loaded with apathy, and with no promises.

She left her home like a whirlwind, barely hanging her bag's strap on her shoulder. The pharmacy was closing in half an hour.

Cutting through the pedestrians with a brisk walk, she pin-pointed the green LED marquee. Beneath the characteristic scent of pressed pills, at the uneventful hour that was quarter past four, she laid her evening perfume around the counter. The eel pharmacist greeted her warmly, and Dana handed over a plastic card. The pharmacist already knew what this was about, she didn't peruse the card anymore. She went in the back to look for her usual prescription.

Walls were lined with boxes of all sizes and colours. Vitamins and supplements, flu remedies, minor ink poisoning tablets, water repelling skin creams. The serious stuff was always in the back. Her prescription was waiting there.

Dana picked it off the counter; neat little paper bag, creamy-white, a pastel yellow-green cross symbol on it. Inside, a drab standardised box, boldly lettered, with three foils of capsules. Enough for living for another month without internal turmoil.

Her job didn't cover these, or any insurance for that matter. Dana brought forwards her debit card. She couldn't be bothered to dig for the crumpled notes in her wallet.

"Take care," the pharmacist's wide snout etched a smile.

Dana was already turning away, though she waved back. "I'll try. You too."

Outside, she made up for the capsules she forgot to take, by taking two. Not really good practice, though she knew what it meant to skip the right dosage - a night lost to subpar ink circulation. She swallowed the capsules dry, as she learned out of necessity. She checked the time and set a new waypoint in her head.

The next destination was easily accessible through public transport. Arowana Mall had its own Underground station and bus stops. It was full of young Inkopolitans, it dizzied her vision whenever she looked out for their trajectories. She'd ideally avoid slamming into someone's kid, though she picked the worst hour. She entered a makeup boutique, one branch of the many owned by an international corporation. Every single rack was filled with sleek beauty products in tidy rows. In the middle of the shop, an anemone employee was scrolling on her phone, leaning on the makeup artist's vanity. Said artist was not in that day. Perfect.

Waving in a perfunctory manner, Dana approached the vanity. Her co-worker waved back and asked her if she was supposed to be in for the evening.

"No, I forgot something the other day and I wanted to check if it's here. Is that okay?"

The employee nodded and went back to her scrolling, letting Dana scour the many drawers in peace. They were full of items with their seals broken: powders, lipsticks, primers, lash glue, dirty brushes. All the clean brushes rested in the topmost drawer, and if Dana ever noticed a dirty brush in it, she would pulverize the last artist to use the table, given the first chance.

Yet, her scavenging felt suspiciously aimless at a closer look. Her eyes often flicked upwards, away from the drawers. Dana waited for someone to approach the checkout till, which prompted the anemone employee to distance herself. With the vanity's big mirror as a cover, she re-opened a drawer she already scanned, and grabbed a fistful of items at random. Naturally. They were in her handbag in less than a blink, like a magician would demonstrate their trick. Sleight of hand wasn't the only element in her repertoire, it was also the knowledge that no security tags were stuck on the unsealed samples.

While the customer and the co-worker waited for the transaction confirmed beep, Dana chimed from behind the vanity, "found it". The anemone flashed her a quick smile, quickly stolen by the transaction rejected beep, significantly sadder in pitch.

Dana was already off. Her haste when leaving any place was the norm, not the exception. She checked the clock one more time. It was still too early to start her shift someplace else, though too late to go back and snooze. What a bother, she was too productive. Nevertheless, it was necessary to function at this pace, whenever she slept past noon.

A quiet terrace on the sea-facing side of Arowana Mall was her liminal space. She would order black coffee, with a single splash of cream and sugar, and spend time with her sole presence. That day, she treated it with music. Her headphones blared underground punk. As intense as the melody was, and as revolted against the woes of contemporary society the lyrics were, her gaze was soft and drowned in cautious thoughts. Palm trees swayed, waves came and went. Her disposition swayed, thoughts came and went.

The less she felt the world around her, the less she would allow it to taint her consciousness. Making it challenging to ignore was part of her meditation. When she filtered out the overwhelming external stimuli she willingly thrust herself into, she felt truly connected to her body. How are you, she'd sigh out, still fucked up? And the ink would pulse smoothly through the veins, in a sign of still hanging there. It was fairly relieving. Finally, there'd be quiet. No coffee scent, no scratchy guitar, no sea breeze.

Except the barista's reminder that the place would close in ten minutes. The clarity from her selfish moment was too cosy to lose, so she hung on it. She moved slower, her expression was unfazed by any thoughts, good or bad, nearly hovering like a ghost. She casually traversed the city's pavements up to a bustling street, lined with restaurants and bars. She looked for the vertical sign depicting an exaggerated feminine inkling silhouette.

The routine from the staff door onwards was purely mechanical. Spot the baby blue bag and claim the vanity next to it, take off the tattered t-shirt, reapply lipstick, fasten the ankle clasp on the high platforms, chalk the palms, raise each knee over the three stairs towards the stage, feel the curtain brush against the unsheathed skin, try not to look into the lights too hard. Grab the pole. Her film roll cut off by that point. Colours would fade back in with each reversed step in her sequence, back to the starting point. She awoken with a fistful of notes, though all low valued.

How did it go? Her body held the story. She floated two lengths of her own height above the floor, all of her ink and blood flowing from her feet to the tip of her ears. Her legs were straightened, pointed carefully so there was a continuity in the line up to the edge of her heels. Her thighs clutched the pole relentlessly, untethered if her skin would've ripped at that moment. Yet, she felt rather secured in her weight, her back arched more, and she could hear the twing of metal on the tip of her claws. She grabbed the pole to complete her bow's arch, and let herself to spin freely, observing the smudges behind her retina that suggested she was in a nightclub. A different one, she remembered. She had been dancing in this one for nearly a month, though she never actually paused to look around it during her repertoire.

For a month, she'd been doing the same routine, adapting it to the current top charting song, keeping the moves in the same order every time. Instead of growing comfortable with it, she was only left with the mistakes, the misalignments. Each night she would draft a new list of corrections, with the intention of finally perfecting the technique.

Frustratingly enough, there was minimal engagement. More patrons were gathered at the bar and chatting up the other dancers. The few left at the rails were staring elsewhere. There always was minimal engagement.

As the pole's spinning was closing to a halt, Dana released her hands and the grip in her thighs briefly.

Free fall.

A grating screech sounded when her head stopped just before the flooring. It left her inner thigh burned to a crisp. Only the sharp squeak of her skin would turn heads around, nothing else. Without it, she wouldn't have been here with the crumpled cash.

Her obsidian eyes allowed the environment to come back into focus. She was sitting in front of her claimed vanity. The changing room was lively, intoxicating. It smelled of gossip. Clothes and personal belongings carpeted the old-fashioned tile floor besides the vanity mirrors. Bauble lights straight from Haddockwood were circling the manky mirrors, providing cold front light. Whoever leaned close enough to the mirrors wasn't a Haddockwood actor, though they tried to get their face in pristine condition like any other. As any good businessmen, the dancers perfected their presentation. The face was the entrance to the storefront, which had only one thing to sell: the rest of the body.

Only two dancers in the entire room were not fixated on their pores. The floor around their vanities was cleared up. Dana and her lilac-inked colleague weren't ready for another go at the stage.

"I think we're done here," Dana said as soon as her head emerged from the tattered t-shirt. There had been a few looks around the changing room, some comments under the breath, though it mattered next to none for them.

Dana's peachy skin stood out against her co-worker's deeper tone. Through relative perception, the other's lilac ink gained a pastel appearance, giving her a striking image. Her ears were slightly longer than average, and her eye mask's ends flicked in a cat-eye shape naturally, putting her face in the idols' ranks. She was sliding a cream silk dress over her head, which nearly got caught in one of her hoop earrings.

"Gosh, what time is it?" The lilac inkling sifted for her phone through the piles of dainty lingerie in her bag. Her phone had a velvety case, also baby blue, adorned with tasteful rhinestones. It was an old model, very well kept, bar the laggy software.

"Late enough to not trust every fucker on the street," Dana raised a cynical brow while staring down at her own phone. No case, base model, with a cracked screen. Its firmware was rock-solid though. A brief minute later, someone was on the way. "Five minutes."

"Thank you, sugar."

The lilac inkling smooshed her outfits back in her bag. Expensive brand, though not the newest collection. Her tentacles came down from her thick ponytail at one tug of the tie, letting them poof outwards, framing her head and upper back. Two tentacles perked up like the Kitsune Plaza guardian's ears, one of the cute upcoming trends of then. She wore them genuinely, rather than for her clients. Dana loved their look and her for it.

The two had met in their first nights of working in such nightclubs. Alone, unsure of the world, discovering unspoken rules at every move. As they walked through the back door, hoping there wouldn't be anyone waiting on the other side, they scanned for their cab. There wasn't high visibility from the downpour they found themselves in. Though, the jellyfish driver was courteous enough to get out and open the door for them.

"You first, Silviana."

Their shoulders were glued together despite the wide backseat. Condensation was building up on the windshield.

Dana let out an unprompted sigh. "Really... Haven't seen a good night in here. Such a waste of time."

"Mm," Silviana hummed with her eyes still on the window. Raindrops were sliding over the dust, giving the cab a welcomed wash.

"Makes me wonder why we switched from the old club in the first place."

"You tell me why," she was semi-sweet in her reply. No sarcasm seeped in it, unlike Dana's.

The wheels rolled on the wet pavement, in front of a tall residential building. It wasn't part of the recently-built residential complexes, nor built for today's architectural trends. It was meant for the more pragmatic days in Inkopolis' history. The city was correctly anticipating a boom in population, so it sacrificed apartment sizing for quantity.

The day had come full circle for Dana, when she unlocked her apartment's door and remembered the dishes, the clothes, the apathy.

Silviana opened up the bedside window wide for her, to let the humid, refreshing atmosphere clear the dry indoor air. While Dana was still pulling her boots off her feet, Silviana was already on the other side of the studio and had the electric kettle in hand. She filled it in with fresh tap water and left it to furiously boil. Dana dumped her handbag's contents on the slim table attached to the opposite wall, which functioned as her kitchen table. She analysed what she managed to nab from the boutique.

"I've got a few single shadows this time, if you wanna have a look," Dana lined the items up by type.

"That's grand," Silviana grinned at a random mug in the cupboard. "I still have the lip glosses, by the way. They last forever."

"They better fucking do, at the prices they've got."

Two mugs appeared on the counter, each brewing the same type of tea. All the tea in the house was bought only with Silviana in mind, Dana wasn't a big fan herself. Just for her, however, she would've taken some sips of the tea she made. Waiting for the brew to finish, Silviana gracefully sat on the tall stool, cross-legged, and observed the free samples from her spot.

Summery tones were in this batch: corals and teals. It reflected what the customers most often asked for when getting a custom look. Dana didn't seem too thrilled about the selection, so she hoped Silviana would pick most of them out. However, whenever Silviana made up her mind, she would pick a single thing out, with utmost conviction, and would immediately forget about the rest.

"This!" She brought a lip gloss up to her face, holding it up against her lips to demonstrate the shade. It would've looked great on her, but...

Dana pouted involuntarily. She can't keep the rest of the products for herself. It was doomed to be more crap that would accumulate in her studio.

"Another lip gloss? Don't you want something that you don't have already?"

"I'm surprised you say that. Every time I come over, I'm amazed by that collection you have over there," her sapphire eyes glanced over a slim, mass-produced bookcase.

Makeup wasn't the only category that warranted a clean up in this apartment. Dana also had chockfull shelves of cassettes, a majority of them were multiples of the exact same three releases.

"We don't have a sense of variety, I suppose," Silviana looked back to Dana.

"Those..." she babbled. "I don't know why I'm still hanging on every copy. Those were supposed to be distributed at shows."

"For that old band you were with?"

"Have I ever played you one? No?"

Silviana tilted her head with interest.

On the bottom shelf, there was a boombox with a millimetre thick layer of dust. Dana pulled it out of the shadows and picked a random falling cassette case. The bare cassette was nested into its place, into the loading door. The player's clockwork engaged the magnetic tape, began turning it with a mechanical fanfare. The machine always played its old fashioned thunks, no matter how recent the cassette was. This one was only two years old.

"Cassettes, though?" Silviana giggled behind her steaming mug. "Haven't these fallen way out of fashion?"

Dana kept her finger on the rewind button, which no longer stuck down by itself. "Listen. If you tell someone at a show: please download our music, the bastard will forget by the time you stop looking at him. If you hand him a cassette, he has no choice but to hold on it until he gets home. He plays it once and realises, hey, this actually is a banger. Damn it, I might've been too young, but I wasn't their manager for nothing."

From her perch, Silviana smiled at Dana's droll pose, who attentively watched the magnetic band for its start, plastic boombox nested in her lap. She pictured her about to give it a hug for its loyal service throughout the years, or a kick outside this dimension if its gears got stuck again.

Dana continued her thesis. "Cassettes are cheap as hell in Silvertip. The town's factory used to make them for the entirety of Inkadia, and now they're landfill material. So," she breathed out a self-explanatory break, then elaborated: "it fit our budget perfectly."

"Oh, absolutely. It's nothing like other media. Back at home we had an entire collection of sardinium discs, pre-GTW. It's mindblowing, they still play like new," Silviana sighed out with glittery eyes. "Our great grandparents afforded using the material on luxuries which lasted for years. I don't want to think how much it would cost today."

The Great Turf War was more than a hundred years behind them. It never seemed like it would ever repeat. Shops were full of plastic guns and paintball masks for athletic teens.

Silviana settled in her chair better. "And you brought these over from Silvertip?"

"Yeah, during the tour. I recorded them individually. Printed each cover."

It was Cutthroat Days' final release. The weakest point in their discography, commercially and artistically.

"Maybe if the tour finished successfully they would've been loaded, absolute sell outs. Radio plays any random crap," Dana said.

"You can't make it on radio without a big push. They had pretty bad sales, right?"

"That's what the clean media writes," Dana grumbled. "The real story is that we fucked each other too hard, and the members started fighting over cash and drugs. They disbanded and left me in this city alone in the middle of the album tour. I had no cash to buy a ticket back home, and here I still am. Hanging for something."

Silviana attempted empathy with her wince. She vaguely knew the story already, though let Dana release steam.

The cassette finally started playing. The first track opened with an overdriven guitar, laying down the foundations of the song: two tortured chords. The drummer added his 200 BPM on top. After a wall of expletives, the singer rasped the same phrase over and over.

Don't you wish you never met her?
Don't you wish you never met her?!

After a barrage of noise and cathartic belting, the song concludes as it started, two minutes later.

Silviana placed her empty mug down. "It's cool. The style fits you."

"Eugh. I'm stopping this tape here," Dana pushed the square button. "This is the only song I liked off this, believe it or not. The rest suck. Actually, I didn't want to skip around the cassette for it, so I told the band to put it first in the tracklist."

Silviana's lips stretched thin. She didn't want to sound rude, though her curiosity came from a honest place. "Why did the rest flop so hard?"

"I don't know. Clark was real in this song. I could actually feel his rage in it. The rest are zero effort."

Silviana knew. It's so egoistical, she knew it was about Dana. She couldn't condemn Dana taking a preference for the songs she inspired though.

"Do you have a tape with your all time favourite, then?" Silviana asked.

Dana shrugged. "Yeah, something from their first album. I can't pick a track, though. I've got a pretty unique tape too. It's a demo. I've got the only copy. You know what? I'll play that instead."

Said demo was in a clear, unlabelled case. The tape had a number on its recorded side, scribbled with a permanent marker. The other side was blank. Upon pressing the play button, a minute of white noise filled the space. The actual recording followed. Chords not too dissimilar to the previous ones strummed, though they came out clean, acoustic. There was less revolt and chaos in this song. In a thematic lapse for the band, the singer wasn't screaming.

Meet me at the intersection,
Don't forget your fuel injection.
You think this love is bona fide,
You're being taken for a ride.

Silviana air tapped her foot from time to time with the strums. She internally debated to what extent did the singer have Dana in mind while writing these lyrics as well.

He tries to impress her, mentally undress her,
It takes more to posses her.

The tape was cut short. The mechanism couldn't automatically stop, and the tape unrolled completely off its right wheel. There was a lingering silence with the boombox dead. Dana was out of diatribes for her past, and Silviana got hit by the chamomile tea. She stretched from her perch.

"Make sure not to throw this one away while cleaning up."

Dana got back on her feet. "Of course not."

"By the way," she softly yawned, "thank you for letting me stay over again."

"As many times as you need," Dana's face brightened instantly. "It definitely helps to live so close to everything. For how often the neighbour to my left is in, you might as well take over his place."

In all honesty, that's what Dana wished anyway.

"I'm saving myself for the dream home," Silviana cooed. Whether she was saving herself for Dana, or saving her efforts, she hadn't decided yet.

Dana slid back on her own stool, and sipped from the already cold tea. Unappetising. "That's a long way to go." She blinked, her expression reverted to blank. "Still is."

Silviana knew what she meant in a heartbeat. "It's getting clearer for me too."

"If we're still getting pocket change for our dances, we're going to the grave with the dream. If those two little bitches kept their mouths shut, we would't discuss this," Dana said.

Nevertheless, Dana's manner of speech was detached, and it was hard to tell whether she was still affected by these setbacks or if she got over it months ago. It gave her rants a sense of cohesion, as they always unfolded like so.

She continued. "This is why you can't trust high street clubs. They got a lot of these bitches that can't look you in the eye unless they're shit talking another dancer. And sausage parties that think throwing tenners on the stage is funny. And absent managers that take the largest slice of the cake. Fuck them all."

"Sweetheart," Silviana frowned. "I don't like it either. The energy in there isn't good for me. Or you."

Dana lit a cigarette, more out of habit than out of craving. Or just to rinse the tea off her tongue. "You know, we can always leave. It's not the only club in Northern Inkopolis."

"How many have there been? Three? We’ll keep leaving every club. Leaving is always easy," Silviana sighed.

"There has to be one for us. If not, it's a broken model from the start. Or there is a better crowd out there and we just don't know."

"It just seems like all of the same," Silviana rubbed the tiredness in her eye, expelling another yawn.

"Someone has to give a fuck out there." Dana spread her palm on the table, expelling whines. "I've pulled my weight enough. When will others fucking do?"

Nearly dozing off, Silviana circled her thumb under her chin. "We'll hang in there, Dana. One day, we'll grow out of this city. We'll have our corner of the world, and we won't have to lift a finger again," she slowly laid her head on the counter.

It was like a bucket that doused the spark of the bushfire. With her sight pinned on the sapphire eyes, Dana couldn't wipe her endearing gaze. She watched them become sleepier, and she'd catch them tracing back to the bed in the studio.

In an unspoken agreement, the two left the kitchen cleaning for the next day, and were settling down for the night. Dana pushed the clothes and palettes into their established piles on the floor.

Silviana sat on one end of the bed. "Where was the moisturiser?"

"Nightstand drawer," Dana slipped another sock off her foot.

A brief rattle sounded until Silviana found it. It was lavender scented.

If you were a flower, you'd be lavender, Dana once told her.

Just because of my ink?

Not only.

Once it got passed over, Dana spread the lotion up to her elbows, including the three spikes jutting out of them. A field of lavender hit her nostrils.

She had a sort of obsession with the scent. Oil, incense sticks, soaps. After lighting up one tea candle and placing it under the ceramic diffuser, Dana crawled under the blanket. Her knee touched Silviana's thigh in the shuffle.

"Man. I'm always dropping dead tired," Dana pulled the blanket to her neck.

"It's been really long days for you."

Dana's chest took in the weight of Silviana's head, her large tentacles squished neatly against her thin tank top. Silviana took note of the heartbeat close to her ear, a single drum banging a sure beat, unlike the three driving her own body. Hearing just one heart doing so much work, moving the viscous blood and ink across all of Dana's veins, it brought a weight upon her own hearts. She wouldn't have ever wanted to know its sound when Dana was off her prescription.

Dana pat Silviana's tentacles, letting her breathe longer into her side. Her bare leg started running against Silviana's, seeping its warmth and silkiness. Their dream life was still blurry, undefined in place and time. They were debating if it would be in the heart of nature, though nature had a lot to offer. She kept the blurry, yet paradisiacal image of her dream home behind her eyelids. For now, it looked like a boundless lavender meadow.