Feel the good cold stinging blood - Ajatar/Harmonia

[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 wants her to want it, of course, not to forsake it or keep it chained. 
But he wants her to want it in a way that benefits him – she will figure that out, one day. Whether she figures that out about him, or another; or already knows it about her mother, who had presented her to him like an arms deal. There will always be someone who wants to take advantage of her – this world is rife with beasties and she is a weapon to them, of great value. 

(Still, there is a bend towards chaos in him, a sliver that would be tempted to finger the latch of Pandora’s box; to let her loose to take the world – the world entire; his dominion and his blood; all the flesh and rock that stands around them – to bring them all back to their basest husks: blood and fear and the violence that comes when the world is uttering its death rattles. So long as he could be the last one standing, on a pile of bones, finally seeing the world as he has always imagined it is, underneath all the paint and pretty things. Dead and greyscale.

She could return them to the ground.)

Ajatar wants to control it for the better, because she is sweet and she means no harm. Noble. There had never been a time where he did not embrace the Fear. By the time it came to him – plunged between his ribs like a dagger as he fell – he was welcoming. He never had the gentleness she seems to have, not even as a boy. He hardened, mud-covered and alone, because he had to. Somehow, she harbors a tenderness, despite everything. He considers her questions, does not appreciate the way they exhume these old feelings, “I could.” He tilts his head, feeling the friendly counterweight of his horns. “Like I said, I wasn’t always like this. I was born without these horns, these hooves, the fear.” 

He submerges, for a few quick, hungry breaths, into the plain of invisibility, coming out of it cold and electrified, “I had only my invisibility to protect myself, against the world and against my mother. The wing, too, I was born with.” He rarely acknowledges the dirty, buggy, sickening thing by his side – is hangs like loose cloth, as if boneless, because the bones therein are shattered and ground down. “I could control that from the start, because I had to. The fear? That came later in life and it never disobeyed me; I never needed to learn it. It was such a part of me.”

That is the problem, isn’t it?
The gift-giver was always a creature of the Primal Cord, Fear.
Ajatar is not like her mother, or her father, at least, not yet. (Maybe she never will be, and that would be such a shame.) She cannot subsume herself to it, every particle in her body rebukes it but for the angry ones. “It felt, stiff, perhaps, at first. I ironed out those kinks in time.”

“I think you can learn to control it, because it is a part of you, too. No matter how you feel about it. But I do not think that will come without effort. I think you will need to practice, to learn how to untangle it from your emotions, if it can be.” He looks at her, black and austere, “you know what that means, right, Ajatar? You will not find it easy, I imagine,” (he always had) “but I can help.”

They can play with pretty things together.

POLLOCK
the gift giver