”Show me,” she says without hesitation. There’s something of a challenge in her voice, a curiosity, and she wonders if she is capable of suffering. She is capable of feeling pain, yes, but does that equate to suffering? Was pain such a bad thing? She’d never experienced it enough to know, and she is unafraid of what he might do to her. Pain is temporary. Dying is something she has no reason to fear. And though she has no reason to, she trusts him. He has done nothing to harm her when he clearly could and instead seeks permission. Why should she not?
At least, she trusts him with herself. She cannot say the same for her trust in him where the ghosts are concerned. Perhaps she is protective of them. He clearly has more claim to death than she does, and yet she feels as if she stands sentinel on its border, ready to fight and die for a world she does not entirely live in. Yet it is her world, the world of the unseen. It is not necessarily the world of darkness and shadows that he lives in, though is certainly can be. There’s just so much more to it. If any truly know suffering, it is the ghosts that are trapped there. Trapped in a cage of their own making.
Is that the sort of suffering Jamie feels? Does he seek pain and death because it is familiar, because it is controllable? She is not sure, but perhaps.
”And who’s fault is that?” she asks, not with condemnation but certainly pointedly. She could have chosen a different path in her relationship with the ghosts. Perhaps her life might have felt like a challenge if she had let her relationship with the ghosts stay challenging, if she had let them bully her or if she had learned to bully them instead.
He is a surprisingly open book in his response, something one doesn’t expect from a man that cloaks himself in shadow. And yet in this whole conversation she has never gotten the sense he’d tried to hide anything about himself. No, he only seemed to hide his physical self, cloaked it in darkness and shadow as if he might never fully be comfortable in a body. Given what the ghosts have just told her, she is not entirely surprised by this thought. ”Who else wishes you had died? And why?” Again, there is no condemnation. She was the child of a murderess, of the harbinger of chaos and war, and so who is she to condemn anyone? No, Iris is simply a curious cat. Knowledge has been her weapon for so long, she will never stop wielding it.
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jamie