Were she to get closer, he knows he would feel the beginning of pain.
Pain more than the way his skin cracks and falls apart—a pain that he now so used to that he doesn’t even notice it anymore. Pain more than the ache he feels when he sees the grass rot beneath him, the heat of him killing spring before it has a chance to flourish. He would feel true pain. Pain rooted in his weakness. Pain that thrives on everything in him that cannot stand up to everything in her.
And yet, there is a part of him that longs for that.
Longs for the sharpness of pain that her presence would bring.
(How quickly would she smother his flames? How fast would she devour his heat?)
“Existing always sounds so simple,” he says with a quirk of his broken lips, flame peering through the lacerations there. “But it is the most complicated thing in the world.” Spoken as though he has decades of life experience when he is instead barely upon his second year. His smile remains though. Still as it may be, carved upon his ashen face, quiet and unmoving. “I imagine not,” he says and there is an arrogance in the way he rolls his shoulders, something fitting for summer, as though he knows how magnificent he is.
“And I am not nearly warm enough.”
Another smile as he studies her, taking in the cold and the mountains and the ice.
“I’m Drakon.”
@annapurna