jamie
He studies her a long while.
And it puts a vicious ache in his chest. It grits his teeth. It tightens a vise around his windpipe, restricts his already labored breathing. It is not illness that disturbs the breathing but something else entirely. The weakness that plagues him. The exhaustion. The body’s violent want to shut down, to give up. It is the manifestation of all of these great and terrible things that make him the thing he is.
“Perhaps they don’t,” he agrees. Or, at least, entertains the idea. And he tilts his peculiar head again – does an awful lot of that, really, for it is the only way he can express thought or confusion – and smiles that same feral smile. “But your beauty is not earthly at all, is it?”
He wonders sometimes whose doing it was. Because both his mother and his father are flesh and blood. Muscle and sinew. His twin sister, too, though she is a living thing that has never been alive. Born without a pulse. He wonders sometimes if there was some mistake. If he only has a heart and lungs and blood because they were meant to be hers.
But he does not dwell on this. Only acknowledges that there is some possibility that his mother, a magician, might have had something to do with it. Whether on purpose or by accident. Drawing her magic from shadows, is it any wonder that her son come out solid darkness?
“You cannot see me, but you know exactly what I look like.” He exhales a long breath. “I look like your shadow. Or anyone else’s.” He turns his head to peer into the deep shadows behind him. “I look like all the darkness you see there.”