a killer come to call, beyza

[jamie]

from the destruction, out of the flame

In truth, he knows nothing of love.

The closest he has ever come to it is the flicker of something warm in his chest when Livinia is near. Their parents are aloof, cold. But even if they had not been, any affection would have been wasted on him. To touch him is such a fruitless endeavor. He is tangible, certainly, but he is not solid. The edges are too soft, he cannot feel them any more plainly than they can feel him.

He studies her a long moment. “They are funny things, shadows,” he muses, rasps, wheezes. He blinks those bold yellow eyes at her, “they cannot exist without light.” He has to pause to draw in a labored breath, shift his weight in an effort to alleviate the ache pulsing in his knees. “But they cannot exist with it either.”

Certainly he is the only shadow that does not elude her. His darkness too compressed to be scattered by all of her light. There, the glint of a lopsided grin. Not insincere, but there is nothing overtly genuine about it either. There seems to be something lurking just beneath the surface.

“They elude you because you are light,” he wheezes, “they cannot help it any more than you can.”

Nothing in him anticipates her question, her offer to help. He blinks his surprise, makes no effort to conceal it. It puts a new ache in his chest, though, to think of help so within reach.

“Ah,” he rasps and tilts his head to glance down at his own legs. “I am not certain if the pain is real or imagined,” he murmurs. “For some time I believed that it must be real, that I must be real the same way that you are real.” Again he pauses to catch his breath. “But I am no longer so certain.”

you need a villain, give me a name

Jamie

@[Beyza] because you know i don't know how the tagging system works and wouldn't have seen the tag anyway