Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be; any

[Kushiel]

If all was right with the world, Kushiel wouldn’t have the luxury of vanity. He routinely singed off most of his mane, and commonly burned too hard the night before and found himself unable to greet the day with the barest of smiles. However, not all was right with the world, and because of that, Kushiel was very, very vain. Not in a way that girls were, no, not in that way at all. He didn’t care if another boy was prettier than him. However, once upon a time, Erebor had been that boy, and Kushiel had tried his best not to let it bother him. Maybe it had, maybe it hadn’t, but when he saw Erebor, he nearly choked on a single, loud bark of laughter. Kushiel knew what bad looked like, and coincidentally, it looked just like Erebor.

Kushiel knew that he should just leave it alone. A part of him wanted to stay out of the other man’s business. Better to let Erebor’s friends deal with it, or perhaps his mother. Kushiel knew, from personal experience, that loving and dutiful mothers could always be counted on to kick you when you were down. If Erebor had been Kushiel’s mother’s son, she would turn up any minute to tell him that he looked like shit. Kushiel resisted for two more, long, unbearable minutes before he ambled over to the horrible wreck that had once been Erebor.

Kushiel flashed the other man a wide, lazy smile, and opened his mouth to make an inappropriate joke when it hit him. The gray stallion grunted as Erebor’s feelings washed over him. It took him a minute to realize what was happening, and then groaned again. It was the empathy. Kushiel was beginning to wonder if Straia had given this ability to him as a punishment, rather than as a tool to do his job. Kushiel tended to offend people about as often as he drew breath, and now he had to feel it. He looked at Erebor nervously, then sighed, a little deflated, and continued. He would just need to become a masochist as well as a pyro.

“You know, I’ve seen roadkill that looked better than you.” And it was true, he had. Kushiel had once seen a deer get crushed by a tree. Erebor looked worse than that deer. Erebor made that deer look like the prime of life.