T
hey were not dead when you picked them. Your flowers were in agony but not dead, not until me. Aeneas had never thought of it that way and there is a moment when he feels regret so sharp it pierces him. He studies her, then, with eyes like slate that do not understand but desperately want to. Aeneas wants to understand. He wants to understand, in part, because watching her bring life to something that should not live enchants him. It enchants Aeneas because he takes; but the things he can create do not animate themselves, cannot yet be touched. Aeneas studies her, with eyes cool and dark and stone-like, because he does not want to feel so alone in his misunderstanding of himself. But when she speaks, this unicorn with a soft voice and a body the color of a blooded lamb, Aeneas learns that she does not misunderstand herself.
Tell me which of us is the killer and which of us is mercy, she says, a statement and not a question. But Aeneas watches her horn tilt up, up, up, and says, “You.” Because he knows in the way he can feel her as one feels a void—there is nothing positive, nothing negative. She simply is, where he draws and changes and channels everything around him. Where he becomes a point of friction, a funnel for all that is bad far easily than for all that is good.
Her rose grows just as her horn points and he watches it with awestruck eyes. He has never seen a black rose before; has never known one to exist. When it touches him, he is assured that it is real and not imagined.
“I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer in the way you want me to,” Aeneas says, perhaps a little coyly. But he says it because she is less girl and more world and he does not think he will ever recover from his envy of that.
the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive
