isolt griffin

I'm more alive than I've ever been

"Oh my god, do you remember this?" Isolt presents the photograph in question to her raven-haired friend so that she may inspect it. It is an older photograph, the edges curled and softened by a thousand separate caresses over the past two decades, but the identities of the pair of girls pictured therein was unmistakable. The girls were young, neither looking a day beyond seven or eight years of age, a mischievous-looking Harley glowering into the lens of the camera with the same impish simper that was and had always been her custom, a massacred lipstick tube clasped in one hand as if it were some manner of trophy. Beside her stood the scrawny, redheaded figure of Isolt, her infant facial features distorted by the smattering of make-up which masked them. Deep, crimson lipstick encircled the delicate cushions of her lips as they turned upwards into an admittedly quite comical grin, gaudy streaks of sapphire eyeshadow bleeding about the brims of her sparkling cerulean eyes.

"You made me look like John Wayne Gacey," she proclaims with a hearty chuckle. Isolt recalls this particular occasion as though it had only just passed, her mother having happened upon the pair during an exceptionally disasterous dress-up session the aftermath of which she had quickly and forever captured. "It looked like I had two black eyes for days afterward." Dozens of additional photographs lay scattered about the dining room table, their glossy veneers glistening against the light that hung overhead. Isolt had come upon them after her escape from Syn and from Risque, entombed in the very same time-worn box within which they had been kept for years. There had been a single time that the fledgling vamprie had dared peek into this proverbial time capsule, her hunger for the presumed comforts of the past having urged her to do so, and it had swiftly and mercilessly driven her to her knees with the agony it had brought. It had been, for so long a time, Isolt's very own Pandora's Box. But now she could once again find joy in these memories, for here with her was the woman that had helped make so very many of them; here, within this nondescript box, lay their child and beyond. Here, laid out before them, was their lives.

A soft knocking upon her door brings the redhead out of the smog of nostalgia within which she dances, her delicate frame lured into rising. "I'll be right back," she assures, traipsing beyond the foyer and down the dimly-lit entry hallway. She feels him even before her outstretched hand clasps the handle of the door, sensing him in a profoundly etherreal way, the supple pout of her lips already easing into the simper of adoration she so often regarded him with. The fire-crowned woman beams unabashedly at her lover as the door swings open to reveal them to one another, her arms sliding about his waist so that her head might rest against the broad expanse of his chest. She lingers for a moment before withdrawing from him, collecting the offered bouquet and chocolate box before her sparkling azure eyes shift to his. "I have someone I want you to meet," she offers before leaning in, her expression perplexed as she whispers so that Harley would not overhear. "No fangs... please." With that plea does she clasp his hand, leading him into the light of the dining room, apprehensive at the notion that soon two of the very most important individuals in her life would meet; soon, her past and her present would converge.

"Harley," she issues with far more conviction and confidence than she was actually given to posses, "this is my fiance, Damon. Damon, this is my best friend Harley... the one I'm always talking about."

Had she breath, she might have held it.