from the destruction, out of the flame
Not enough, she says.
It slithers deep, winds itself wicked around his dark heart.
But he merely blinks at her and smiles that feral, feral smile. Drags in a breath that rattles his lungs. He can feel the strength leaving, pooling in his feet from where it had collected in his muscles. It feels like melting, it always does. As his energy dwindles and the breathing gets thin.
He is a thing of the shadows. He is a solitary thing. In time, he has even taken his leave from his sister. Condemned himself to the darkness. He does not know the meaning of loneliness, has never wanted for much of anything at all. But she has touched him, he watched her do it. And, while he had been fortunate enough not to inherit his father’s curse, he did inherit the deadened nerves. The inability to feel that went along with being alive without really being alive.
He’d watched her touch him but had felt nothing but the distant stirring of something dark and wicked at the very center of him. How sweet it must have been, he thinks.
“What else would you have liked to know?” he asks but does not move to eliminate any of the space he has wedged between them. He does wonder, in some abstract way, if he would feel anything at all if he should drag the ink-black mouth across the surface of her skin. If his mouth would repel the water that clings to her.
“I learned nothing,” he wheezes, “that I did not already know.”
And he rolls his shoulders in a kind of shrug, but it is slow and feeble. He is tired and weak.
“It becomes painful after awhile,” he tell her, unabashed, “to know that you are only an idea.”
you need a villain, give me a name