It is such a terribly long journey. The breathing is thin and labored by the time he reaches the Field, the chest heaving and the ribs aching. What a feeble thing he is, compressed darkness, and when he bleeds the blood is black, too. He is hardly a child now and the legs ache with all the growing he’s done, the process faster for a shadow thing than it has been for his sister, and he might have been handsome if he’d been given the chance. He might have looked like his sister, who looked like their mother, who looked like their father. But he is a shadow thing and he hardly has a face at all.

She is the first thing he sees, standing there all alone, and fog coils around his legs as he moves toward her. Slow. Feeble. There is nothing threatening about all that darkness despite how unnerving those big, round eyes and those sharp, sharp teeth. But he smiles, placid, as he stops just short of her. The breath is still labored, the chest still heaving. Such a terribly weak thing. There is something empty in the smile, something odd in the way he tilts his head.

“Hello,” he says and the voice is thin, too. “My name is Jamie,” he tells her, though she hasn’t asked. He has met enough wayward souls in Pangea to know that it’s polite to introduce yourself. He studies her a moment, thinks her roughly the same age as he and his twin sister. So, he blinks those big yellow eyes and asks, “are you lost?”

Because his sister is certainly too young to be in a place like this, so she must be, too.

She is not lost, but she looks it.
And he cannot help but wonder what this means. He slinks a little closer, tilts his peculiar head, studies her pretty face. That soft, soft voice like the fine hide of a rabbit. It folds around him easy, makes him shudder. He is a cold thing, not used to all that warmth.

“Padmé ,” he echoes, but his voice sounds nothing like hers. It’s soft, certainly, but soft like fog. Thin, like his father’s.

She turns the question on him and the only indication of his smile is the flash of those sharp, sharp teeth. Because the mouth is dark and it blends in with the rest of him and he exhales something that might have sounded like a laugh if only he were someone else, somewhere else.

“No,” he says and shakes his dark head without drawing those wide yellow eyes away from her face. “Are you looking for a home?” he asks after a single pulse of silence, the stare unnerving. “I can offer you someplace to stay,” he continues, “should you need one.”