jamie
He is a child, certainly, just as they are children.
But he is not the same as them.
He is a crippled thing, subject to the shadows, lurking in the darkness. He is most content there, as he tests his power. He pulls the fog, thick and dense and heavy, around himself. He tears open the fabric of the universe and travels through long, black tunnels. But oh, the energy it requires! It leaves him gasping, chest heaving, until he lays himself down to sleep. And he can sleep for hours – sometimes what feels like days.
Because he is a child, certainly
But he is not the same as them.
He has wandered into the sun but it does not warm him. He has wandered into the sun because he’d seen her – his sister – sprinting after a fleet-footed rabbit and he is curious to know whether or not she’d caught it. He emerges from the darkness, pressed against a canyon wall, and follows. But he is so much slower than she, his sister who is not hindered by the condition of being alive, and by the time he reaches her the rabbit has died and another child has joined her. The child is brilliant white, bright enough to make his eyes ache. He has to blink and look away, focusing his attention on the dead thing at his sister’s feet as he ambles toward them.
The joints ache and he heaves a deep breath when he finally reaches them and shackles his focus to his sister’s face. The blood dripping down her chin. Eating, he thinks, or trying to. He shifts his gaze to the rabbit as the two speak, thinks how easy it would be to sink his own razor-sharp teeth into the rabbit’s jugular so that his sister might drink freely. But he’d seen the way she’d wiped her mouth on her leg when the other child approached, so he doesn’t.
“I’m Jamie,” he says in the silence after his sister shares her name. Livinia watches the other child intently, but Jamie cannot bring himself to look at her. Not with the way all that white hurts his eyes. So, when he says his name, it is almost as if he is addressing the dead rabbit.
@[Beyza] @[Livinia]