It doesn’t matter where he takes them, or when, only that he does. It’s the simplicity in the transaction alone that thrills him; the power behind gifting that which they cannot hope to afford that sends the hot prickle of adrenaline down the ridge of his spine. He, himself, has eluded this truth despite it showing readily on the surface of his reflections. It reads like sentences through the lines on his body, but he doesn’t see the danger in himself or his manipulations. He doesn’t care that he tangles threads of time and space each time his heart aches and he needs to display his own self-worth to the world.
He doesn’t think himself dangerous, but the dangerous often don’t.
So, he tears the universe into halves and makes it into what he wants. He bends time and space to suit his will, gives hips to girls too young to know the meaning of them, and casts glass-clear windows of would-be futures to those without the hope of them. There is a power that he holds in the palms of his hands that slips between the cracks of his fingers – it spills out like oil into the sea of everything else. He doesn’t think himself dangerous, but the ocean will be black before long.
He had hoped for awe. He had hoped for wonder. He had hoped, and fallen short when the dismay in his travelling companion’s eyes is palpable. The hiss and click of teeth and the sound of clattering on cobblestone is enough to flatten his ears out against his head and tickle a nerve Elektrum will not readily admit exists – but there is just enough cruelty spun into his flesh to ignite a spark of aggravation that coils behind his black eyes and curves through the cavernous bends of his mind. There is just enough cruelty spun into his flesh to make resentment an easy choice.
“Ima,” it says, and Elektrum does not bother to conceal the boredom in the sigh he huffs next, but there is a flash and a bang. There are flickers of light, and flickers of nothing, and they’ll invade his senses of everything else. There is everything and nothing simultaneously. He looks out across a horizon of time and sees every height and groove of every edge and corner that exists. He sees then and now. He sees when and why. He sees what and how.
And then he sees something that he himself has never had. He feels the heat off her flesh, and it’s a maternal warmth that heats his bones. He sees Ima. He knows.
And then there is a flash and a bang, and he is once again himself beside his aweless companion. “Ima,” Elektrum repeats, with a hint of smugness that coats the syllables and makes them bolder. It isn’t subtle, but there is not much about him that is. “Very well.”
But there is just enough cruelty spun into his flesh to make a choice that is less than kind. There is a flash and a bang, and he takes them to a beach. There is nothing save for the dark and muddied skies, the sand. The tide is rolling out and unearthing ivory bones normally buried beneath the curl of blue ocean and sea foam.
“This is the last place she was,” he says. He doesn’t say why, and he doesn’t have too. The answer is obvious, written in the marrow of the bones littering the shoreline. The answer is obvious, reflected in the hungry black eyes of the scavenger birds flying circles overhead.
“This is what you wanted,” he says, with a smile that reads victorious.
elektrum
i am and always will be the optimist