fic: errerrin, untitled drabble

Cake request for 3-year-old Hitler namesake denied - what a scary article. :|

Anyway, a drabble 383 words long. It's heading somewhere, but I don't care to find out at the moment. Still, interesting enough to post.

I'd rate it PG-13 at the highest, if even that.

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Give me a son, Talin had said, and I will heal your wings.

As if she could have said no.

Exactly two years to the day Talin had uttered those words, Kit had been born: too small, too thin, too quiet, too wrong—but alive, and male. Talin had fulfilled his promise: her wings spread proper now, majestic, and colored a thousand subtle hues in the light.

He had not set her free.

She knew why. Kit spent most of his days asleep, his skin too hot. He never cried, but when he looked at her with the wide, beautiful eyes he had inherited from his father, she thought that it was because he couldn’t.

And he was so small.

They didn’t know what to feed him. The milk from her breasts was refused. Faceless servants brought a thousand different concoctions: teas and milks and honey, even, imported from the other side of the world. They tried solids, too: the raw meat she preferred and the plants and cooked meat the elves ate, but that never worked. He would drink blood, at least, if she touched it gently to his lips.

“You will have to stay,” Talin told her. He visited every day. She didn’t know why.

“You think he will die,” Elisza guessed.

Kit was three months old, and sleeping restlessly. Elisza stroked his cheek lightly with the back of a clawed hand. His malnourishment made his features seem too big. His closed eyes bulged, and his lips thrust out.

“What will you do with him?” Elisza wondered.

“The Seraph will give the child to her son,” Talin answered.

They meant to make him a tool, then. She did not imagine that he would be very useful, however. He was too fragile.

“If he dies, what then?” she asked.

Talin did not answer.

“I see,” she said. “And what if the other babes I give you die as well?”

He did not answer, only reached forward and touched Kit’s forehead with a finger, a ghost-touch the baby could not have felt. But Kit’s eyes flickered open, and they focused with frightening intensity on that finger.

When Talin left, Kit’s eyes closed again, but Elisza could not forget that strong gaze. She looked pensively down at Kit and wondered what he would become.

Labels: _fiction, c: elisza, c: kit scythe, c: talin shadow-walker, verse: errerrin