05-08-2023, 08:45 PM
jamie
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
Certainly he could show her what it means to suffer and what tremendous pleasure it would bring him to do so. (He thinks now of Balto, of how the pair of them had wept while the cavedweller had begged Jamie to save him. Though, in that case, saving him had meant killing him. Killing him and then watching him be reborn as something else entirely. How fiercely he had loved the cavedweller.)
“I could show you,” he tells her then and the fog stirs, pulls tighter around them as he steadily meets her gaze, greedy. “How can one truly live if they don’t know what it means to suffer?” he asks, head tilted, that mouth twisted into something grotesque.
Is it an admonishment? Is she chastising him when she tells him that the ghosts get restless when the living take without asking? There is some sharp thrill at the idea of it, that she should consider herself their protector. He could turn to them, draw them to him, bend them so easily to his will. Why should he respect a thing he can command?
“I do not have the same relationship with them that you do,” he says, rolling a dark shoulder in a kind of shrug. “My relationship with Death has never had much to do with respect.”
And then she goes quiet, communing with them, and he could listen (eavesdrop?) but there is some thrill in this, too. The idea that she might tell him something that he does not know. But they tell her this. That he had been weak once, that he had labored simply to breathe, to exist, that he had hid from the sun and cursed it for rising each morning. (Why else would all of Beqanna been plunged into that terrible darkness when he’d emerged the Alliance’s victor?)
His smile deepens and he coughs out a raspy laugh. “They’re right,” he muses, “I should not have lived.” The opinion is not lost on him, that the ghosts believed that they’d all have been better off had he died in those earliest days. “The ghosts are not the only things in Beqanna that wish I’d have died then either,” he continues, shifting his weight, remembering how fiercely the joints had ached with the effort it had taken simply to live.
“Are you that interested in knowing? If there is anything at all you’d like to know about me, Iris, all you have to do is ask.”
“I could show you,” he tells her then and the fog stirs, pulls tighter around them as he steadily meets her gaze, greedy. “How can one truly live if they don’t know what it means to suffer?” he asks, head tilted, that mouth twisted into something grotesque.
Is it an admonishment? Is she chastising him when she tells him that the ghosts get restless when the living take without asking? There is some sharp thrill at the idea of it, that she should consider herself their protector. He could turn to them, draw them to him, bend them so easily to his will. Why should he respect a thing he can command?
“I do not have the same relationship with them that you do,” he says, rolling a dark shoulder in a kind of shrug. “My relationship with Death has never had much to do with respect.”
And then she goes quiet, communing with them, and he could listen (eavesdrop?) but there is some thrill in this, too. The idea that she might tell him something that he does not know. But they tell her this. That he had been weak once, that he had labored simply to breathe, to exist, that he had hid from the sun and cursed it for rising each morning. (Why else would all of Beqanna been plunged into that terrible darkness when he’d emerged the Alliance’s victor?)
His smile deepens and he coughs out a raspy laugh. “They’re right,” he muses, “I should not have lived.” The opinion is not lost on him, that the ghosts believed that they’d all have been better off had he died in those earliest days. “The ghosts are not the only things in Beqanna that wish I’d have died then either,” he continues, shifting his weight, remembering how fiercely the joints had ached with the effort it had taken simply to live.
“Are you that interested in knowing? If there is anything at all you’d like to know about me, Iris, all you have to do is ask.”
AND IT LEAVES ME COLD
@
Iris