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Dakota stared at the television, a blank look plastered on his lupine features. The canned laughter from nostalgic sitcoms and the bland movements of the stereotypical characters blended into a grey atmosphere of dullness, symbolically parallel to the heavy fog of lethargic stillness that settled softly in his mind. His amber eyes were wide and bleak, stark and grave with a peculiar sense of tranquility that bordered on numbness. The room was dark, the only light coming from the television and the barcode slivers of gold that managed to find their way through the blinds of the patio window.

He had had his arms crossed over his green t-shirt for the past two hours. The large D-rings on his black and green arm-warmers had surely imprinted their likeness into his skin, but he didn't mind. He probably would later, but not now. His breathing was quiet and shallow as he felt himself sink deeper into the beige couch, his shoulders and head making soft, convulsive movements every now and then. His silver tail drooped lifelessly between his spread legs over the edge of the couch.

Finally, with an almost physical effort, he shifted his eyes slowly down to the bandage on the back of his right paw. His heart started jumping faster in his chest, although his face retained its blank stare. He looked back to the television, breathing slowly and almost unnoticeably lightly.

A smooth voice drifted into his ears from behind the couch. "Hey there, handsome," it said.

Winston, a tall, lithe black fox, walked up behind the couch, peeling off his white shirt ("Steal my sandwich and I take your soul!" it proclaimed) and laying it over the top of the beige furniture, revealing his noticeable abs and flat stomach etched in snowy white naval fur. He squinted his light blue eyes at the wolf, who stared at the television and made no discernible gesture proving that he noticed Winston.

The fox grinned and brushed his fingertips gently against Dakota's ear tips, tickling him. The wolf did nothing; he didn't move, he didn't say anything, only his ears twitched jerkily. The smile faded as quickly as it had appeared from the fox's muzzle. He leaned over and looked into Dakota's silvery, blank face. He placed a paw on the wolf's shoulder and shook him softly.

"Dakota?" the black fox said worriedly.

Whether it was the sound of the wolf hearing his name being called, or if it was the sound produced itself, It was enough to shock him out of his odd stupor. He gasped sharply and jerked his head toward Winston, who instinctively took a step back from the wolf's unexpected movement.

"Jesus," Winston muttered.

"Oh...Hey, Win," Dakota said. "When did you get in here?"

"Just now. What, uh...what was that all about?"

The wolf looked at his lover with an experienced mask of perplexity. He cocked his head at an angle and said "What are you talking about?"

"Well," Winston stammered, "You were just spacing out for a minute there..."

Dakota quickly dismissed Winston's accusation with a wave of his paw. "Ah, I was just...thinking hard. You know how I look when I'm thinking."

Winston was in the middle of saying something when he noticed the bandage on Dakota's paw. He pointed it out and squinted at the wolf with his blue eyes again. "When did you get that little accessory?"

Dakota glanced at the white bandage, and his face contorted into a strange look that the fox couldn't place, but was unnerved by it nevertheless. The wolf tried to hide the look, but the attempt was pitiful at best. He looked back to Winston and gave a feeble smile. "Its nothing," he said, "Nothing really--Would you mind getting me a Pepsi?"

Winston looked down at the wolf with a look of the utmost confusion. Why was Dakota acting this way? Why is he avoiding my questions? I don't remember him being like this at all. He glared down at Dakota's face, at that silly little wide-eyed smiley face that always managed to open up something in Winston's heart. He leaned in closer to the wolf, his face filled with worry.

"Do you want to talk about something, Dakota?"

The smile faltered a little on the wolf's silvery muzzle, but it managed to stay in place long enough for him to say "No, Win. I'm fine, just a little thirsty."

The fox gave the wolf an extended look of suspicious concern, then stood up. "Are you sure?" he said, trying hard to not keep that pleading sound from entering his voice when the words got out.

"Yes," the wolf said. He was still looking up at Winston with that cutesy, angled smile of his.

Winston took a few steps to the kitchen when he heard Dakota say in a timid voice, "No..."

The fox turned back and walked around the couch. He sat down and looked expectantly at the little wolf, who by now had taken off his actor's mask, allowing Winston to see the worry and fear that brooded in his face. The fox blinked as he noticed for the first time the heavy bags that formed beneath Dakota's eyes, the tell-tale neon sign for sleepless nights. They looked at each other for a short while, waiting for the other to be the first to speak.

Finally, the wolf broke the silence by sniffing loudly. He looked down at his bandaged paw, staring at the little patch of white cloth with eyes that were rapidly becoming damp. "I'm scared out my mind, Win," he said pathetically. He shook his head and wiped away the tears that just broke through, destroying with an affirmed wetness the last possible thread of what might have been any form of machismo.

Winston brushed a gentle hand against Dakota's shoulders. "Why don't you lie down and tell me all about it?" he said. He tried to use his smooth "Cool Joe" voice, but the anxiety in his voice crept through like an evident plague. Dakota looked somewhat averse to lying down, but he saw the tender look in the fox's face, and the loosening feeling in his chest filled him with guilt. He didn't like keeping the affectionate fox in the dark like this. Even though it was his problem, he supposed Winston could at least hear about it. He twisted on the couch, laying his feet over the side as he rested his head in Winston's lap. He crossed his arms over his stomach and started fingering the little straps on his arm-warmers.

Winston placed a hand delicately on the wolf's head, running and brushing his fingers through the dark brown hair. Dakota sighed, but it sounded more like a shivering exhalation of breath, as though he were very cold. The tears found their chance to escape, and Dakota began sobbing uncontrollably. Once the levee broke, the sea of emotions that had been playing in the wolf's mind boiled over and crashed over him, engulfing him in terrified sadness. He cried for the better half of twenty long, tear-soaked minutes. Winston only looked down at the pitiful visage of his boyfriend, his own face twisted into a look of worry that he was unused to associating with the wolf. He continued to stroke Dakota's soft brown hair, feeling a tear or two slip from his own eyes.

When Dakota managed to control himself, he stared up at Winston, who took his unoccupied hand and proceeded to wipe away the tears that clung to the wolf's cheeks.

"What's wrong, Dakota?" Winston asked softly.

The wolf sniffed as he glanced away from the fox to the television. With a hollow, quivering voice, he said "They're getting worse." A rogue tear dropped quickly from his eye and fell slickly down to the floor.

"The nightmares?"

"Yeah. Every damn night...they're getting more and more real."

Winston continued to brush the wolf's hair with smooth, steady strokes of his paw. "What happened this time?" he said, despite the fact that he had no intention of wanting to know.

He had already heard enough of Dakota's nighttime delusions, and as much as it annoyed him that Dakota couldn't get over the fact that they weren't real, he didn't want to change the subject to the real reason he had come over. He decided to let Dakota's paranoia slide yet again, and he listened half-heartedly as the wolf recounted his latest journey through his nocturnal Hell.

"I was lying in a hospital bed, and there were all these...things, looking over me. My arms and my legs were strapped down, so I couldn't move. I knew what they were going to do, so I just started flailing around, trying to get out. Then this claw smashes my head down against the bed, and there's this fox pushing his face right up against mine. He takes out a scalpel and he starts...cutting. I begged him to stop it, but he didn't hear. I felt everything, Win."

Winston nodded, trying not to seem like he didn't want to listen. He continued to caress his wolf's hair mechanically.

"It changed to some dark room with padded walls. I was lying in the corner, holding a little book...I think it was a diary. I heard a crashing sound, and some kind of screaming, then blood started flowing out of holes in the walls. It seeped out of cracks in the floor...there were things swimming in it..."

Winston swallowed and looked away irately. It was those damn movies that were giving him nightmares. Every weekend it was Night of The Something-or-other, or Planet of The So-and-So. Always drenched in gore and blood. Why the Hell couldn't Dakota see that it was his own fault for being scared out of his mind?

"There were just so many things that happened, Win," the wolf continued. "The last one...I was being chased by something. I couldn't see it, but it made these awful gurgling sounds. It grabbed me and threw me to the ground. I felt it bite me..." Dakota raised his bandaged paw and looked at it curiously, studying it like it was some new form of life from some distant planet.

Suddenly Winston's unoccupied paw came around and gripped the wolf's elevated one. Their fingers entwined around each other's and fit smoothly together like an exact pair of gears. Dakota stared up into Winston's soft blue eyes, and he sighed. In that slow, unsteadied exhalation of breath was the culminated sum of his distress and panic that had saturated him in the night, and it all left him when he looked up into the fox's face.

"I know you think I'm crazy, Win," Dakota said.

"No, I don't think you're crazy. It's just..."

"Dreams can't hurt me? Yeah, yeah, I know. My parents gave me a whole sermon on that last Thursday. But how can I explain the cut on my paw?"

"You must've fallen in your sleep, and the back of your paw hit something sharp. Did you fall out of bed?"

"I don't know. I guess I might've..."

"There you go. It's only gravity that's your worst enemy."

Dakota gave a wry smile. His grip on Winston's paw tightened and he started to breathe regularly as he crossed his legs. "Let's not talk about it anymore, Win. I can tell what it's doing to you."

The fox stammered as he tried to make some contradictory comment, but he gave it up and nodded his head instead. He drew Dakota's injured paw up to his muzzle and gently gave it a kiss, brushing his lips tenderly over the wolf's fingers. Dakota's smile broadened and he closed his eyes as he savored the fox's touch. He craved that warm feeling, since it was the only thing that drove away the nightmares. "Besides," he said, "I'm sure anything else would be a better conversation topic."

Winston cleared his throat and swallowed, aware that his cheeks had flushed. He sighed through his nose and looked down at the wolf, who looked so serene and peaceful in his lap. His blue eyes noticed the way Dakota's hair was brushed to the side, instead of hanging over his face like some brownish curtain, the way it used to be. He smiled at the unintentional cuteness of the wolf's black nose, and he followed the curved line of Dakota's smile, remembering the supple, silky texture of his lips. The silvery-blue fur that covered the lupine head, ending at the lower jaw where the snowy white fur began.

Did he want to throw all that away? It's what he'd be risking if he told the wolf just why he came over. Sure it was a while ago, but he knew Dakota long enough to know that the wolf never let things go. He absorbed things, capturing them like a net sifting through a river, and he always remembered them, regardless of how long ago they were. He always held a grudge, and Winston wondered if the wolf ever made an exception. Finally, he made up his mind.

"Dakota, I have to tell you something. It's probably not important now, but..."

"What is it, Win?"

Winston racked his brain as he tried to conjure up the right words that wouldn't make him sound either like a jerk or a sappy romantic. "Do you remember," he began, "that one day at camp? We were alone together, and the sun was just setting over the trees, making the sky all gold and purple. We were walking just beside that one cliff, where the waves were crashing beneath that stone gateway..."

Dakota smiled fondly at the memory. "Yeah. That was the day I fell on you...accidentally."

Winston chuckled reminiscently. He was about to say something when Dakota interrupted him. "You said such wonderful things that day."

"Heh...I did, didn't I?" Winston chuckled. He felt the gentle pressure of Dakota's paw pressing against his own, and the moments of irritation he felt when the wolf recited his nightmares all seemed so needless, so uncalled-for right now. He loved Dakota, and that was why he had to tell him.

"I, uh, I have to tell you something about those words."

"What?"

"The things I said to you, they were, uh...they weren't really...true..."

Dakota opened his eyes and looked up at Winston. He said "What?"

"Well, they were true, but the pretenses under which I said them were, uh...not right."

"Win, what're you saying?"

The black fox sighed through his nose again. He really didn't want to say it, but he didn't want this thing to stay inside of him like some parasitic centipede, eating him from the inside out whenever he sat next to his wolf. He cleared his throat and carried on.

"I never wanted to fall in love with you," Winston said as he glanced up to the still-active television. "You just had this amazing figure, and a pretty face, and it was the only thing I wanted that night. I was frustrated and confused with how things were going with my life, and I didn't know how to handle it, so I...I thought that if I had sex with a guy, then...maybe things would seem smoother, if I got a piece of tail."

He didn't want to look down, to stare into Dakota's vicious and vengeful amber eyes. The sight they held would burn into his own eyes like a white-hot fire, embedding the wolf's hatred into him forever. He was afraid of how the wolf would be looking at him, but the unavoidable effect of curiosity's attraction to look was too strong, and he lowered his eyes. Contrary to his fears, the wolf was not looking at him, but at the television. There was a lost quality that stuck out in those silvery-white lupine features, a look that exhibited forlornness that seemed fifty times worse to Winston than a look of anger. Winston gave a subtle, tentative brush of the wolf's hair with a short, hesitant gesture.

"Dakota?" he said, worry spewing unfiltered in his voice.

Dakota said nothing. He only stared at the television.

"Dakota, please say somethi--."

"Why are you telling me this, Winston?"

"Because...I didn't want us to start out our relationship on some falsity. You believing one thing and me thinking another...I didn't want that. I mean...It just wouldn't have felt right if I knew we started with...with one foot in the grave."

"Hmmm," Dakota hummed, "One foot in the grave..."

"You know what I mean."

There was a silence, broken only by the periodical canned phony-laughter from the television sitcom. Winston hadn't noticed it before, but the sitcom playing was "The Munsters." A lot of subtle dark humor, indirect and overused with primary 1960's overtones. All in all, it was a healthy distraction from reality.

"Dakota..."

"It's alright, Win. I don't blame you for anything."

"...Really?"

The wolf turned his head and looked up into the black fox's soft blue eyes, those eyes he remembered falling for almost two years ago now...under a "false pretense." The events that happened between then and now seemed to make that event so negligible, and if Winston really had changed his reasons for being with him, then the "false pretense" would have been instantly negated.

"Do you really love me, Win?"

"Yes, I really do."

"Then no one's to blame." Dakota fixed a smile on his muzzle, an expression that for some reason felt kind of alien to him. The muscles in his muzzle that were used for such an expression had been inactive for a while (the faux smile he gave earlier didn't count; it was strange how his body could tell the difference like that), and it felt so good to shock those muscles back into use.

"You know that I'd do anything for you. Right, Dakota?"

"I know," the wolf said softly. He brought up his left paw that had been stapled to his stomach all this time and reached up to the fox's night-black muzzle. He brushed his fingers gently through the soft, silky fur, caressing with the same loving touch Winston gave him. Then he reached behind the fox's head and tenderly brought Winston's muzzle down to his own, brushing his own lips sweetly against the fox's lips before giving a light kiss. They held each other for a long while, the sun having left its peak of solar dominion in the sky and smoothly slipping beneath the darkening horizon before Winston finally spoke.

"Any nightmares tonight, Dakota?"

"No...I think this is going to be a good night."

Five Hours Later...

Winston woke up to the eardrum-rattling sound of the phone ringing. He reached over in his bed and grabbed the phone from its cradle on the night stand, wondering who the hell it could be wanting to talk to him so late at night, and wondering if he should thank them for bringing him out of the nightmare he was in. He brought the phone up to his ear and grumbled with the voice of semi-wakefulness into the mouthpiece.

"Hello?"

There was an incoherent whimpering on the other line, punctuated by slight jabs of a high-pitched wheezing. The tittering sound of broken glass crinkled through, and Winston made out Dakota's voice slipping softly into his ears.

"Win, you have to come to the house...please, you have to come over--."

There was a loud crash on the other end, and Dakota screams into the mouthpiece, followed by a deafening babble of confusing sounds, and then a horrible silence that lasted until Winston slammed down the phone back onto its cradle.

He jumped out of bed as though shocked by a cattle prod, throwing the covers down onto the floor in a heaped up jumble. He grabbed a jacket and hastily slid into a pair of sweatpants, leaving his chest bare. Dakota's house was only a block away, so he didn't bother with shoes. He ran through the house, down the stairs and through the doorway, bounding forcefully over the railing and onto the sidewalk.

His heart was pounding heavily in his chest, jumping in strides greater than his own as he ran. He felt a disconnected sense of weightlessness that seemed to push him forward, but it also made him afraid that he would trip over some unexpected obstruction and turn the pavement into a runway for his face. He ran onward, speeding up as he saw Dakota's house.

He rushed through the door, squinting desperately through the darkness that seemed to be so densely thick, so touchably thick. He knew his way around the building, but the out-of-placeness of the situation seemed to infect his bearings, and he didn't know which way to turn. Suddenly the sound of something heavy being overturned clattered into his ears from the living room, and he made a mad dash toward that sound, heedless of the sharp table corner that scraped his hip as he ran passed it.

He was in the black living room, himself a dim specter with only his white fur barely visible. All around him came disengaged frightful sounds, of things scurrying and scratching at the hardwood floor while making tittering, gurgling noises. Winston wheeled around, trying to follow the noises so he could evade their undetectable owners. He sidestepped and dodged, twisting his head this way and that as he sought with wide ears the sounds of his wolf, but he found it difficult to hear anything with the frantic, percussive noises that surrounded, interposed by that singularly haunting, gurgling sound.

Something rough rubbed against his leg, and Winston cried out in shock, stumbling backward. His feet came in contact with something hard, and he fell backward with arms flailing out for anything he could grab. As his back crashed into the wall, his right hand had managed to grab something smooth and hairy. He brought it down with him in the fall.

In his shock, the piercing yelp of pain stabbed through Winston's ears like a dagger, and his eyes widened helplessly when he realized with dawning comprehension that he had grabbed Dakota's head in the fall.

There was a flurry of movement, and Winston grunted when he felt Dakota's sharp claws digging into his skin, breaking through and drawing blood. He brought up his hands to cover himself, but he felt Dakota edge in, nuzzling under his arms. He felt something wet and sharp touch his shoulder, and he gasped in disbelief when he felt Dakota biting him. He tried to pry the wolf off, but the lupine's primal instincts had taken over, and the jaws were crushing down on his flesh with a searing pain.

"Stop!" he screamed, bringing his arms up and around the wolf, embracing him and pushing him away simultaneously. "Dakota, stop it!"

It did the trick. He felt the wolf unlatch his jaws from his bleeding shoulder, slowly sliding backward until it felt like the wolf was straddling him. There was a silence that seemed to coincide with the darkness very well, like a pair of long-time lovers come back again after a period of desolation. The only sound was their breathing, and the steady, quick-paced thumping of their hearts.

Winston was about to speak when he heard the wolf mumble something he couldn't hear.

"What?" he said, clutching his bleeding shoulder.

"It followed me out this time," he heard Dakota say, very distinctly this time. Winston brought his arms around and embraced the terrified wolf, who he could feel was shivering terribly. The wolf welcomed his arms and seemed to go limp in them, muttering Winston's name over and over again.

Winston felt the irrepressible urge to see his wolf, to know without any possible doubt that it was his wolf. He shifted on the floor, slightly pushing the wolf away as took out the cell phone he always kept in his left pocket (in his frenzied panic back in his room, he grabbed it without realizing it). He flicked it open, casting on the floor, himself, and his lover a bright, bluish-white light. He saw a streamer of blackish-red blood running down Dakota's nose, and his right eye was dark and puffy. A tear in the wolf's ear was exuding a river of red that cascaded down his face. Winston's heart leapt up into his throat, and his eyes became teary as he embraced the wolf again, pulling him into a tight hug. He shut his eyes, and he listened to their hearts beating in near-perfect harmony. He only opened them when he heard Dakota say, in a soft voice that was so familiar to him, "Oh, Win."

Suddenly something attracted Winston's attention, darting in and out of the boundary of light, staying in the shadows. But it had come close enough, and the black fox screamed as he saw, wreathed in what might have been a greenish-black body of constantly reforming limbs and musculature, a single orange eye, immense and glowing with a light that did not seem to fit with the general workings of natural physics. Its single pupil stared at him, black and vacant, while that vile, orange light seemed to be opposing the radiance of his cell phone, pushing it back. Winston flipped Dakota off of him and grabbed the wolf's arm, hauling him up and drawing him closer as he ran for the kitchen, which led to the patio outside.

He heard the thing's grotesque scuttling movement, and the gurgling sound it made as it followed them, circling around them with unnatural speed until Winston heard the low, guttural sound directly in front of him. He felt Dakota's grip on his arm tighten painfully into a vice-like grasp.

The light from the patio entered into the kitchen, and because of the limited walls it shone dimly into the living room. The thing in front of them was a horrible nightmarish silhouette, never really retaining an original shape, but still staying large in size, pawing at the air in front of them with formless claws. Winston stared hard at the iridescent eye, glaring at him with intentions he could only guess at. Dakota whimpered beside him, and the thing chattered and grunted in front of him, and the fear that Winston felt inside of him threatened to rip apart his sense of reason.

Suddenly the thing leapt at him, gurgling and tittering as it moved with lightning speed. It landed on top of him, driving the wind from his lungs and forcing him down to the floor with a resounding crash. The eye, that terrifying glowing globe, filled his vision as he fell, and the chattering sound was like a saw being put through solid bone.

Winston tried to grab at the thing, but all his hand kept grasping was a mass of thick jelly that slid fluidly through his fingers. He felt a flurry of appendages brushing against him, stroking him abusively with arms that bristled with rough, course hair. The weight of the thing was like having a refrigerator on top of him, pushing him into the floor. It pressed against his lungs and drove the air from his lungs as it pressed its single eye close to him. Winston pushed against the chattering thing with all his might, straining the muscles in his arms and feeling the adrenaline course behind his eyes, but the thing held itself down, anchoring itself to the floor by jabbing its legs into the floor. The black fox knew this because one of the thing's legs had crashed down mere inches from his head, jabbing through the floor with a dull, crashing noise.

There were more bristling appendages caressing his body, predominantly around his chest. Winston felt a tickling sensation, then something wet sliding over his body, rubbing itself into his fur. The next thing Winston knew was a hellish wave of agony exploding up from his chest into his brain, sending shockwaves of pain throughout his body. He grabbed at the appendage the thing had stabbed him with, but his hands still came up with that viscous semi-liquid.

As Winston stared up into the glowing eye of the thing, he realized just how terribly the creature smelled.

Suddenly, a loud cry of rage and terror broke through the clacking and guttural vocalizing of the night-creature. Winston caught a momentary glimpse in the arcane demon-light of a hand, gripping something small and sharp (in Winston's fevered mind, he thought it was a pen), stab the thing directly in the center of the thing's grotesque ocular device, splashing his vision and blinding him with a thick, black, vile smelling liquid that covered his face and got into his open mouth, leaving a foul taste that burned his tongue.

The night-creature screamed shrilly and hurled itself from the floor, writhing and twisting its amorphous body in a bizarre tarantella of pain. It crawled blindly up the wall with unnatural speed, with its misshapen limbs generating multiple digits as its body began a horrendous impersonation of a cake batter that has just been put into the oven. Its general size swelled to twice that of its original in only a few seconds, and in moments, as its bloated body became too much for it to successfully keep a hold onto the ceiling, it let loose a shrill scream of terror (Winston imagined he heard an all-too-familiar tone and quality in the sound, something he knew he had heard somewhere but couldn't quite place) and scrabbled for a few seconds with its now disproportionately small claws before falling.

Winston waited for the resulting crash, but no sound was made. There was a despicable, deceptive silence that Winston did not like. As he looked at the place where the thing should have landed, he noticed that faint demon-light of the thing's eye, blacked and injured though it was. It was throbbing, pulsating with periodic bursts of that aberrant luminescence, and as Winston watched the light reflect off of the far wall, the eye twisted on its newly-formed stalk to stare at him.

The thing gave another scream, one that mixed the peak of its anger, hatred, pain, and fear into one massive outburst of disturbing noise, then collapsed onto the floor with slight twitching movements of its unformed parts. Then, before Winston's shocked and disbelieving eyes, the creature faded slowly and subtlety into the darkness, leaving no trace of blood...anywhere. The only evidence to prove the thing's ludicrous existence was the smashed and upturned objects lying strewn about the floor of the living room, and the tears and deep furrows in the ceiling and floor made by its gnarled claws.

There was no sound, only the sound of heavy breathing, and Winston was sure that the owner of that breath was himself. Slowly, he pushed off of the floor to get up, but was stopped short by the thunder-explosion of pain that lanced its sadistic way across his body. He gasped and laid back down onto the floor, using his right hand to sightlessly explore his body, searching for the spot where the thing had bitten him. His fingers were several inches above his pelvis when he felt the hot, wet liquid covering his belly fur. Out of dumb shock and astonished curiosity, he probed further along until he touched the rim of the hole the thing had made. His hand shrank back as another wave of pain enveloped him. He whimpered softly, grasping and scratching at the floor with his claws as he rested his head on the cold surface.

Suddenly a bright bluish-white light shone from up above him. In the light radiated out from the other side of his cell phone, Winston could make out Dakota's face. There was fear there, but...it seemed lessened, almost resolute. His eyes were brighter, too.

As Winston looked into those amber-yellow gemstones, glinting brightly in the cell phone's azure luminosity, he desperately wanted to have a certain pair of arms around him.

Dakota sat down on his belly perpendicular to the black fox. Cautiously, he leaned forward and placed his elbow on the other side of Winston's head, cradling the fox with hands that were hot and damp with sweat. Winston didn't notice it, but Dakota had already placed a cloth or towel over his bleeding wound.

They looked into each other's eyes, words no longer being a necessity nor a priority.

Winston and Dakota both gave a heavy sigh, and in those sighs were the culmination of their pain and anguish leaving them, for their owners had discovered the insignificance of nightmares when put up against their love for each other.