Anyone;

[garbage]

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; She is kind in a way she should not be, not to him. It’s too easy, you see – for her to look at him with a gaze that is familiar and new all at once, to speak a simple kindness to him. Such small, common things, but it makes his heart twist, it makes him want. Makes him hope. Such a dangerous thing, hope. Yet it wrenches through him as his stomach flutters at her smile, broken thing that it is, at her kind words. Alive for a reason. He doesn’t know the reason, not at all. He is not a good man (there are too many sins in his past, a mountain of them, for this alone, he is better off dead). He has done nothing to improve the world, or even to change it, he has wandered Beqanna a nomad ever since he was a child. He has not kept track of his children, but has not heard their names on anyone’s lips, because they, too, are a shade of worthlessness. “There’s no reason I know of,” he says, soft. The words are self-pitying, and he hates himself for it, but the truth has always spilled too easy from his lips. And then she is closer, and touching him – oh, she shouldn’t do that, he’s too weak – and he holds his breath, fixed on the warmth of her, frozen in the brief intimacy of the moment. Then he touches her, too, a moment of his mouth against her neck, the odd mix of scales and hair, slick and unfamiliar against his touch. He withdraws, then, fighting to urge to keep touching her, because he doesn’t want her to run, and surely she will if he keeps down this terrible path. “I’m sorry,” he says, as if he is the cause for her misfortune, “you deserve so much more.” Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain.