jamie
“Forgive me,” he murmurs and exhales a rasping breath, blinking at her. The only indication that he is alive, really. Those big yellow eyes and the delicate flare of his nostrils, the labored, wheezing breath. “I don’t trust myself.” He pauses then, dragging in another shuddering breath. The talking makes him weak, too. Drains him of his energy.
He is getting stronger, Jamie, but he is still so weak.
And sometimes he wonders if it will ever get better.
If someday he will know true strength.
If someday he will stand and the knees will not tremble and the joints will not ache and he will remain untouched by exhaustion. Like his father, so blissfully out of reach of all of the things that plague a mortal body. And how strange that Jamie should feel them at all when he is so little more than compressed darkness. Shadows forced into the shape of a horse.
“I don’t trust myself to look at you too closely.” He finally finishes his thought. And perhaps if he had a brow to furrow, the smile that follows might have seemed apologetic. But each of his smiles is the same, feral, vaguely threatening if for no other reason than because it is lined with sharp, sharp teeth.
And again, he tilts his peculiar head. Smiles that feral smile, blinks those bright yellow eyes. “Well,” he murmurs and turns that bold gaze to the river’s edge. “I must be the figment of someone’s imagination. Wouldn’t you think?”
He draws in another thin, shuddering breath. Chances a sidelong glance in her direction. “I am the same shape as you,” he continues, labored, “it is clear that whomever fashioned me did so with an equine in mind. But I am not like you at all, am I?”