I need you to be a monster
which is to say, I am trying not to love you
I’m sure there are far worse places to be in Beqanna, she says, and he has to wonder. He has not explored much of Beqanna, has drifted in its nomad lands, all terribly uneventful until the happenings on that foreign beach.
(Was that place part of Beqanna? He supposes it might be. He doesn’t know its borders, has committed little of its geography to memory. If that is the case, then she is most certainly correct.)
“There’s always a worse place,” he says, and thinks of the battlefield. How ill-suited he has been for such a place! He still doesn’t understand why he was chosen – he was taken, was put to these stupid, awful tasks, for no purpose he could find. And no reward for it, either, save for the glimpse of stars on his coat, a thing he would gladly tear from his skin if it meant undoing the experience.
She answers the question with a much better answer than he - greatness, she says. She has a purpose about her, which he, an often purpose-less man, much admires. He gives her a smile of his own.
“Do you know how you’ll find it?” he asks, curious, “greatness, I mean. It seems to come in so many different ways.”
(Had greatness been what Pollock was looking for? Had he felt greatness creep under his skin, when he made creatures so lowly as Rapt kneel before him? Rapt wonders what greatness feels like, but the more he thinks about it, the more the concept becomes abstract, slippery, like minnows in a river.)
“Maybe I can even help you find greatness,” he says, and laughs, “though I might not know it even if it was staring me in the face.”
Maybe it is.
“I’m Rapt, by the way.”
which is to say, I am still dreaming of kissing your claws