How strange it is, to see himself from her perspective.
The expression smooth and the eyes blank. He has caught no glimpse of himself since all of the life had been drained from him. He has felt no thirst and therefore has had no reason to venture down to the river, no reason to interrogate his reflection.
But she shows him himself and he thinks that were he capable of pain he might have felt it then.
And, as if conjured by the thought, there is another sharp twinge in the cavern of his useless chest. Strong enough that, had he drawn breath, it might have hitched the air in his lungs. Strong enough that it makes him grimace.
He blinks at her as she withdraws, perplexed. He misunderstands what she’s asking, his head hazy with a kind of baseline terror. Not enough to jam him up with panic, but enough to know that it’s there. A steady hum in his bones. There is no way of knowing what he’s afraid of, really. Afraid of the glimpse of feeling, maybe. Afraid of the fact that he can feel that terror (even if only just barely) at all.
“My mother named me Kensley,” he tells her, as if talking alone will distract him from the kinetic buzz in his bones, “and the name was mine for decades. But,” he pauses then, shakes his head mournfully, “so much has happened, I don’t think it belongs to me anymore.”
It is almost the answer she is looking for, but he does not specify exactly when he lost the name. When he disappointed everyone that had ever loved him.
He does not recognize the concern in her expression, if she wears any at all. And still, he does not recoil when she reaches for him. Not until the spark, which ordinarily would not have troubled him enough to retreat. For so long, he felt no fear, no trepidation. He had no sense of self-preservation left after being dead so many years. But she skitters back and he does, too. And he finds, when he comes to rest, that it had not been instinct that had driven him backward. He feels it now and there is no mistaking it, the steady rush of surprise.
The terror he’d felt as a steady thrum in his bones reaches a crescendo, drowns out everything else. If he drew breath, certainly his chest would be heaving.
He feels alive.
One glimpse of euphoria before the inevitable downfall.
He grimaces and he shakes his weary head.
It is only a matter of time before the pain comes.
@[Aela]