Destroying, indestructible: he is there and not, hiding behind a carbon shell and avarice.
Stealing life was and is never a challenge. She grew with him and watched him grow. She saw how he became used to seeing eyes deprived of light in Xing. But this is not home and he is older, in age and in the way he holds himself as a weapon. This is not six months ago and he has changed; obvious in the way smiles are rare and in the way his eyes swiftly glaze from sorrow to wrath.
What has happened? Have the long winter months, in which she could not watch over him, consumed him? Has Greed slowly seeped into him, becoming him?
She does not hear the voice of a boy who once asked her to accompany him on an impossible journey to immortality. She does not hear the voice of the young prince who carried her, limp and useless, through the streets of a city of dogs.
She lowers her eyes.
She only hears the voice of a man she does not recognize. A man who cackles at fire and ash and speaks in possessives. Always in possessives.
This is not the boy she knew; he cannot return to what he has unknowingly wiped from his own slate. He is renewed, born again, different. He has matured without maturity.
This transformation, this loss of innocence and ignorant eyes is worth weeping for, perhaps more than for a loss of life. But she maintains her composure and watches him.
She is there and not, hiding behind a wooden mask and an expression: observing and unobserved.