✦ HIS HEAD IS SWIMMING, AND HIS VISION HAS YET to clear — for once, not because of the tadpole, more the result of miscast solar flare that hit him with the force of a poleaxe — but theodore is as he always is after a particularly satisfying fight: calm, collected, in his element. and his expression is set to one of the utmost disgust. he hears that dreadful butler's crooning in his head no matter how hard he tries to box it out; it oozes into his thoughts, oil-slick and tarry, telling him over and over that he is an artist, that the mangled mess he leaves in his wake is the truest expression of his soul — that this is his birthright and his glory. this hideousness sits in his chest and pulses like a clot. he holds himself deathly still as if he could will it to burst or disolve, but neither thing comes to pass.
what he can force himself to be aware of, and focus on, to drown the sensation out: @starseized kneeling by the rock he had perched on, scraping blood and grit out of an open slice across his palm.
“you don't have to,” he tries to say, though the ingratitude of it galls him, “it doesn't hurt.”
and this much is true. he remembers nothing before this misadventure, but his body remembers pain — real pain — and these shallow injuries, though they bled and tore and stained her hands red, weren't a fraction of what they could have been in order to incapacitate him. perhaps that was what his birthright really was: to shoulder violence, his own and that which he inflicted, without feeling the full depth of it. a felled tree would have more life in its trunk than the whole mouldering form of him.
“gods, harpies are a ridiculous bunch. you know what i found in that nest? some dying man's letter to his wife — and three gold. probably all the miserable wretch had left on him — but why would they keep the letter? what could a harpy possibly want with a letter?”
