Though he does not look like a monster, he often feels like one. But not the kind of monster she lusts after. No, he is the lowest kind. One of his own making, one he can easily loathe (it’s so much easier to hate oneself than to confront the shortcomings that make it so).
It is this loathing that hides the truth of his power, at least to himself. He had never bothered learning how to harness it, because what is the point? The panther is his escape, nothing more.
Perhaps she would teach him, in whatever manner she was capable of. Or perhaps she would find his spirit too broken and realize the futility of her interest.
Of course, none of this is apparent to him. He sees only the strange woman flanked by her equally strange creation and wonders what it is that had drawn her to him. Her words, as meaningless as his own had been, tell him little. Her face tells him even less, masked by the distortion in her understanding of reality.
Her question baffles him, but he cannot seem to help the dry sarcasm slipping easily past his tongue. “My feet.”
He wasn’t quite certain how she actually wished him to respond, and in his confusion, he grows defensive even as his humor becomes more biting. But then, her humor had been no more understandable than his own. “I suppose talking to you is merely a side effect.”
Ion continues to chew on the words she had spoken, mind stuck on something. And then it clicks. Too, she had said. Why?
“You… came here to talk to me?”
ion
in the empty of the grave, only distant dreams remain
@[violence]