The hunger in India’s eyes as she watches him is, he’s sure, a reflection of his own whenever India carefully reveals a piece of her life, her past to him, and the wonder that India is as curious about him as he about her is, as always, very nearly overwhelming. In his mind’s eye, he imagines India engrossed within the pages of a library copy, perhaps even at the same time as he, several states away in his little self-imposed prison. Another connection, another commonality, this time thanks to the writings of a writer dead 400 years. It makes his heart swell and beat in his chest every time he discovers another way India mirrors him, enough to almost make him feel alive.
“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair well-spoken days,” he finds himself saying, the words rising to his lips from the murky depths of his memory as he turns from India to face dead forward again, “I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days. Do you think Richard is the villain of the story?” His arms pull India closer against him, although the look in his eyes turns distant, his mind’s eye on an England of the past, a Richard who never truly existed and yet on his worst days feels to him more real as lines on a page than he does to himself. “I am a villain. I guess he says so often himself. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t the protagonist of his own story.” He turns to India again, his eyes once more impossibly young and impossibly deep with the legacy of his blood, and as always he sees it reflected in her dark, vivid eyes. “And the same can be said for us, India.”
Her eyes are tethered to him. He is not present, not alive with the same fire he had been when he was in her mouth, or teasing her all through dinner. The same can be said for us. She doesn’t know why something resonates so deeply there, but it seeps through her skin, past the blood beneath, and settles in her bones. When is a villain a villain? Perhaps, she wonders, it is only when someone else is encumbered with morality. India has never been moral. Practical, perhaps. At times, sedate. (But would a father tell his moral girl she had to kill a bird so the rest of the world might sleep easy? She does not yet know what he feared. Maybe it is this.)
"It’s better that way,” she says. “I’ve never liked how badly the people in stories want to be good.” What a waste of wanting--where were the people who wanted power? Freedom? Belonging? Something deep and base that kept them up at night? They seemed the saint when most they played the devil, as it were. “I don’t know that I blame Richard. He didn’t owe his family anything. They made him what he was. They shouldn’t be surprised.” It is a simple answer, she thinks, but one she’s never known anyone before him to reach. Would someone blame a starving hawk for tearing open the flesh of a beloved pet? If it hadn’t been starved, perhaps the thing below might have lived another day.
Monsters are hungry, before they are grotesque. “Most who get usurped had it coming.”
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
2087
