[The wash of that rag has him listless; it vanishes the second that he understands how this has to seem. Alertness snapping back into his vision, compressing everything he feels into a single, blinding point: like an engine sputtering to life in a rush of animated reflex, he wears his thoughts across his sleeve. His tattered, bloodstained sleeve. Silk snagging a little under the indent of Fenris' waiting thumb, wrapping just around its edge.
—oh?]
Oh.
No, neither. [When everything he knows is barbed wire and fanged sharpness and want, he oscillates, still. The same overquickened sense of footing, there and gone again; excuse like an explanation, only it sinks inside his throat instead of rises.] You don't need to stop.
[He can't recall the last time he's said that.]
Let's just say that the way you were altered isn't the same way that I was.
Running water has a nasty tendency to burn when in contact with the accursed. Quite literally burn. [Masked on the off chance it was a telltale trackmark for vampirism and its revilement, but now— with so much care melting him away through every second of tread mercy, a temptation he can't shake. Never could, though he'd always paid its price.] I was prepared to endure it. I've felt so much worse for a great deal less in the grander scheme of all these years, that a little pain would only be worth it if it meant not gawking uselessly at you through a half-functioning pair of eyes.
Now I—
Gods, I don't know what to think.
[A blink, and Fenris' hands feel so damned sturdy that he drifts for just a beat beneath its run. Leaving someone else's hold across the reins. Unfamiliar. Too familiar.
no subject
—oh?]
Oh.
No, neither. [When everything he knows is barbed wire and fanged sharpness and want, he oscillates, still. The same overquickened sense of footing, there and gone again; excuse like an explanation, only it sinks inside his throat instead of rises.] You don't need to stop.
[He can't recall the last time he's said that.]
Let's just say that the way you were altered isn't the same way that I was.
Running water has a nasty tendency to burn when in contact with the accursed. Quite literally burn. [Masked on the off chance it was a telltale trackmark for vampirism and its revilement, but now— with so much care melting him away through every second of tread mercy, a temptation he can't shake. Never could, though he'd always paid its price.] I was prepared to endure it. I've felt so much worse for a great deal less in the grander scheme of all these years, that a little pain would only be worth it if it meant not gawking uselessly at you through a half-functioning pair of eyes.
Now I—
Gods, I don't know what to think.
[A blink, and Fenris' hands feel so damned sturdy that he drifts for just a beat beneath its run. Leaving someone else's hold across the reins. Unfamiliar. Too familiar.
Changed.]
....I really am free of him, aren't I.