"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
What does it feel like.
Does she rot? If he peered in at the meat of her, would it appear just as withered as the grass underfoot? There is some small thrill that snakes through his gut at the thought of it. (And he thinks briefly of the dead thing he’d summoned, the horror of it, how it staggers now between this world and the next.) He smiles then, the mouth dripping ink-black as he tilts that strange head and considers the question.
Theoretically, he knows what a rhetorical question is. But Jamie is nothing if not a literal creature, so he answers. “Suffering,” he tells her. Because, for him, that is what living has always been. From the earliest days of his youth, when the joints had ached and the breathing had been labored and he had slid between the shadows, frightened of the sun. When he had pulled the fog tightly around himself, just as he pulls it around them now. (He has aged and grown and accumulated power beyond his wildest dreams, certainly, but he is a small thing at heart. He is still that boy who’d found tremendous comfort in the darkness, in the pain of it all.)
He turns his focus then to the ghosts outside. He does not look at them, no, but delves into their frantic minds. Their thoughts always race, he has found. More often than not, they are plagued by panic. And then he glances back at her, this girl who has made an alliance with the ghosts.
He knows that she is not the only one with this gift, that there are others in Beqanna who commune with spirits. But she considers them friends, which is something else altogether. (Does he consider them friends, he whose magic is tethered to Death? No, not especially, certainly not in the way that she does.)
He wonders, were he anyone else, if they might try to destroy him for obscuring her from them. If they’d gnash their teeth in protest. “What do they tell you?” he asks then, voice low.
Maybe she does rot. Maybe her own poison will slowly kill her from the inside out, insidious and undetectable to a girl who keeps the company of the dead. If there is any effect, she does not know. She imagines that her power gives her the ability to simply remove any poisons sent coursing through her, to manipulate anything that might try to harm her so that it no longer could. But if he tried to create something new and foreign, she would not stop him. Curiosity killed the cat…or perhaps, it just made the cat stronger.
She tilts her head in response to his answer, considering. Suffering, he says, and she cannot relate, for she has never felt as if she’s suffered. This is probably far from the truth if you asked an outsider - she watched Beqanna swallow her mother whole (she did not care), she had been tormented by ghosts before they became her friends (it just felt like a challenge), and she will spend her lifetime walking the blurred line between life and death (and she cannot imagine it any other way). Iris simply didn’t suffer. She just never saw life in that vein, but then again, she’d never experienced what he had either. ”I cannot say I relate,” she says simply, without pity for him or for her or any emotion. It is just a fact, and Iris has always been rather factual.
“They don’t like when you pry,” she says simply, noting their rising panic and catching a few yelps of displeasure and protest. “They are far more useful to you if you respect them.” She can command them too. Perhaps not at the same level Jamie could, for he clearly has power she cannot hope to wield, but still, she can call to them. She can force them. Instead, she asks, and they come willingly. She never pries into their mind but waits for them to offer information, praises them for their usefulness, and they love her all the more for it. Straia ruled by fear - and Iris didn’t disagree that fear has its place - but love and respect are powerful weapons too.
He asks a question, though she doesn't answer right away. Her ears flick, listening to the whispers of the ghosts as they share his secrets. She grins slightly, something highly satisfied in that grin. Not at his misfortune, but simply at the ghost's willingness to help her prove her point. “They tell me that you were not always so powerful. Quite the opposite, in fact. A weak thing, struggling to breathe, afraid of the sun. You should not have lived, it seems.” She pauses, ears flicking for a moment as one of the ghosts suggests that they would have preferred the magician of death had died long ago. Too late for that, though. ”Shall I see what other secrets they know?”
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
Certainly he could show her what it means to suffer and what tremendous pleasure it would bring him to do so. (He thinks now of Balto, of how the pair of them had wept while the cavedweller had begged Jamie to save him. Though, in that case, saving him had meant killing him. Killing him and then watching him be reborn as something else entirely. How fiercely he had loved the cavedweller.)
“I could show you,” he tells her then and the fog stirs, pulls tighter around them as he steadily meets her gaze, greedy. “How can one truly live if they don’t know what it means to suffer?” he asks, head tilted, that mouth twisted into something grotesque.
Is it an admonishment? Is she chastising him when she tells him that the ghosts get restless when the living take without asking? There is some sharp thrill at the idea of it, that she should consider herself their protector. He could turn to them, draw them to him, bend them so easily to his will. Why should he respect a thing he can command?
“I do not have the same relationship with them that you do,” he says, rolling a dark shoulder in a kind of shrug. “My relationship with Death has never had much to do with respect.”
And then she goes quiet, communing with them, and he could listen (eavesdrop?) but there is some thrill in this, too. The idea that she might tell him something that he does not know. But they tell her this. That he had been weak once, that he had labored simply to breathe, to exist, that he had hid from the sun and cursed it for rising each morning. (Why else would all of Beqanna been plunged into that terrible darkness when he’d emerged the Alliance’s victor?)
His smile deepens and he coughs out a raspy laugh. “They’re right,” he muses, “I should not have lived.” The opinion is not lost on him, that the ghosts believed that they’d all have been better off had he died in those earliest days. “The ghosts are not the only things in Beqanna that wish I’d have died then either,” he continues, shifting his weight, remembering how fiercely the joints had ached with the effort it had taken simply to live.
“Are you that interested in knowing? If there is anything at all you’d like to know about me, Iris, all you have to do is ask.”
”Show me,” she says without hesitation. There’s something of a challenge in her voice, a curiosity, and she wonders if she is capable of suffering. She is capable of feeling pain, yes, but does that equate to suffering? Was pain such a bad thing? She’d never experienced it enough to know, and she is unafraid of what he might do to her. Pain is temporary. Dying is something she has no reason to fear. And though she has no reason to, she trusts him. He has done nothing to harm her when he clearly could and instead seeks permission. Why should she not?
At least, she trusts him with herself. She cannot say the same for her trust in him where the ghosts are concerned. Perhaps she is protective of them. He clearly has more claim to death than she does, and yet she feels as if she stands sentinel on its border, ready to fight and die for a world she does not entirely live in. Yet it is her world, the world of the unseen. It is not necessarily the world of darkness and shadows that he lives in, though is certainly can be. There’s just so much more to it. If any truly know suffering, it is the ghosts that are trapped there. Trapped in a cage of their own making.
Is that the sort of suffering Jamie feels? Does he seek pain and death because it is familiar, because it is controllable? She is not sure, but perhaps.
”And who’s fault is that?” she asks, not with condemnation but certainly pointedly. She could have chosen a different path in her relationship with the ghosts. Perhaps her life might have felt like a challenge if she had let her relationship with the ghosts stay challenging, if she had let them bully her or if she had learned to bully them instead.
He is a surprisingly open book in his response, something one doesn’t expect from a man that cloaks himself in shadow. And yet in this whole conversation she has never gotten the sense he’d tried to hide anything about himself. No, he only seemed to hide his physical self, cloaked it in darkness and shadow as if he might never fully be comfortable in a body. Given what the ghosts have just told her, she is not entirely surprised by this thought. ”Who else wishes you had died? And why?” Again, there is no condemnation. She was the child of a murderess, of the harbinger of chaos and war, and so who is she to condemn anyone? No, Iris is simply a curious cat. Knowledge has been her weapon for so long, she will never stop wielding it.
Iris
