hold me down [any]

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

He might be impressed with her self-assurance.

Except that it is naive, at her age; naive at any age. And naivety is weakness, and weakness is to be put down on sight. When she grows up she may find she can act the mistress of her own volition; she may discover, deep within herself, tools that had been previously dormant. She may even gain powers at cost, as he had, in his northern dream-place. But she will never be without the haunt of demigods. This land quakes with them, has been split apart and redrawn by them – horses that can turn his own claws from the outside in. And they will never be sated.
He is only minor in their pantheon.

She is protected from him only by her youth, it insulates her from the full affect of his rancor. Let them meet when she is full and womanly. Let him find her then: trusting of him, her strange and imposing shepherd, and let him remind her of this day in kind. He does not soften in preparation for his role. It is not in him. Impelled by something indelibly dark in his core, he only returns back to sight and looks down on her with glinting, hostile eyes. He doesn’t need to, in any case, fear is a powerful motivator; fear is a powerful manipulator. ’How do you do that?’ He smiles a crooked smile, feeling her come to him another step – drawn to him like a bright light. He remembers when he first felt the freedom of clarity.

He had been so very young, maybe even her age exactly. Phina had wandered off in pursuit of white rabbits, and dread had gripped him. Pure, concentrated, he had squinted and called out into the darkness and then he had receded. The broken boy was on his own, and life finds a way.
He had received his gift from neither his mother, nor father.
Inborn, without roots, it had found him in his need of it.

When she asks, Pollock lowers his head again to her eye level, catching them like a dare. “Do you want to know how I found my power?” He shifts his weight, his wing sliding across the dirty ground to follow.
“My mother left me alone, not long after I came into this world, still wet and cold... Wandered off into the night,” His voice grows with a darkness, the roil of clouds heralding a storm. He spits the word mother out with venom. “Leaving me alone in the very dark kind of dark. And in that darkness I could hear the growl of a monster, creeping closer to me.” He straightens up to full height, looking down at her with one eye, “And poof. Every piece of my body was smart enough to conceal itself. Nobody else was there to protect me, and it is a foolhardy thing for a baby to make itself conspicuous.”
Foolhardy, indeed.

He imagines the bite of the words will go over her head, but the power in them will not.
“I needed to be protected, I learned to wield it because I needed it,” (and then he needed to watch wolves rip meat from the bones of rabbits; and males prey on mares in the night; and to get himself close enough to strike and to give chase without being shaken; and to laugh madly as she whips around and shrieks into the night, curing the ghost that bruises her flesh with teeth and horn – chaos) “What do you need it for?”

If her answer is power, he is intimate with that pursuit.
But invisibility is not power in itself, or at least, it had never been to him – not true power as he knows it now. Just a safe place from which he could incubate his wretchedness. Invisibility is his conduit to misdeeds. She needn’t know that just yet.

“Or would you like to try it my way? I could find you monsters easily.”


Pollock,
The gift-giver.

there's (maybe one of) Pollock's "do you want to know how i got these scars?" moment XP