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“You’re not listening,” Venti sits against the headboard, knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped tight around them as if he is trying to keep himself bound up, contained, and small with only the force of his own two arms. “Or you’re not understanding . Kazuha, I am not-” He aborts his sentence.
A boyish figure cloaked in green and white, brown and gold, a mortal shell like an exoskeleton.
“What you see is a fraction. A sliver. A single note in the entire symphony of what I am. Do you know what it would do to you if I dropped the veil? If you saw me as I am? Kazuha, it would crush you. Your mind would unravel under the weight of it. No mortal can bear that kind of scope. I’m not a real person , like you. I’m the wind and the void it fills, the open sky and everything beyond it, the song that began before time. If you even glimpsed it, you’d-” He cuts himself off, swallowing hard.
“It’s not something you can overcome with skill or courage, willpower or human spirit. If I so much as sang the wrong note, you could…” His voice wavers.
When he speaks again, it’s quieter. “Men have killed themselves for less. For far less. They’ve gone mad, clawed at their own skin, begged for the release of silence when confronted with realities I consider mundane. I could unravel your entire being with a stray thought, Kazuha. Not because I want to, not because I would ever try, but because that’s what I am. You don’t cage a hurricane and expect it not to tear through everything when the bars fail.”
Venti’s fingers dig into his own arms now, nails pressing crescent moons into the lightly freckled skin. It is warm and has the slightest give of soft, fatty tissue. It’s smooth, unblemished, and a warm shade of pink too healthy to be human. His fingernails break skin, and a single bead of perfect ruby red rh-null wells up. The surface tension never breaks.
“I’ve existed since before time had a name. There is no beginning for me, no end. Don’t you understand what that means? Do you understand how alien that makes me? Everything you think you know about me, is, well… it’s entirely true, sure. But it’s also nothing. It’s like drinking a glass of water and thinking you know the ocean. I could destroy you if I lose myself to my emotions. The wind doesn’t ask permission before it tears roofs from homes or drowns ships at sea. It just does. That’s what I am. My passion is deadly.” His voice crackles, frays, breaks apart in sounds that human throats are not meant to make.
It is subtle.
Just as everything about him is subtle.
His admission hasn’t made him any more or less human. His facade hasn’t grown any stronger or slipped any further since yesterday, or the day before that. He is exactly as human as he has always been.
Is he just noticing the cracks more, now?
He stops abruptly, chest heaving, his eyes darting to Kazuha’s face to search for any sign that his words have sunk in.
Kazuha is nodding along, slowly, as he has been. He is attentive. He takes a long drag of a short blunt, eyes closed. “Hot.”