jamie
from the destruction, out of the flame
Everything, she says, as if everything about him cannot be learned in the space of a breath.
But he does not speak, merely blinks those bright yellow eyes at her while the knees tremble and the breath rattles. She sinks closer and he feels no impulse to tell her not to now. Because he is already destroyed, because the damage has already been done.
He considers her question. Grins, flashes those teeth, and faintly shakes his head. The only indication that he’s moving at all being the way his eyes move in the dark. The way the teeth move. “I knew that you would touch me and I would know you were touching me, but I would not feel anything.” Nothing but the darkness coiling like a viper in the pit of his gut, vibrating in his chest.
“Ill?” he asks, his tone registering surprise. “No, I am not ill.” She knows as well as he does that a thing that is not real cannot be ill, doesn’t she? But if he’s not ill, what is he? All that phantom pain. The weakness, the exhaustion, the way the lungs spasm when he breathes. Not even he’s certain if any of these things are real or figments of his own sordid imagination.
He grits his teeth for an instant, the longest he can manage, because the effort makes him dizzy. He slinks closer, too, when she speaks. When she entertains the idea that she thought him up, that she is responsible for this shadow thing that moves as if to surround her. But he exhales another wheezing breath and merely lays his peculiar head against her shoulder.
“Won’t you stop thinking me up?” he murmurs, rasps, whispers, sighs. “Won’t you let me rest?”
you need a villain, give me a name
