With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He is half-surprised when she stops. A part of him had been sure that she would simply walk on, pretend not to hear him – for why would she want to stop and engage a thing such as he? True, he looks better in this iteration – reborn, he is no longer swaybacked, gray doesn’t speckle his muzzle, he is dark and strong, but still, he doesn’t matter. But she stops. She replies. There is something in her voice, an undercurrent – of understanding, perhaps? – and he exhales, a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He notices, now, the butterflies that do not seem to stray far from her side, another small enhancement. He is plain an unadorned, his only power invisible, and more a curse than a blessing. (For a man who is so willing to die, rebirth is a particularly cruel joke.) She shares her name, and he nods, committing it to memory. It’s an interesting name, tumbling off the tongue, so different from his own, which he shares with her, now. “My name is Garbage,” he says. He has never considering lying about his name, or changing it – it was the one thing Craft gave him, and so he keeps it with him. She asks, then, why he stopped. He wonders how to answer without frightening her, without sounding too strange. “You’re a living sunset,” he says, “I had to stop and see if you were real.” Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |
@[brunhilde]