Oh, I have taken too little care of this
King Lear
The boy breathes in quick flutters; little hitches of breath that stab him like a thousand tiny ice-daggers.
He kneels beside him on the cold hard flagstones, his hands fluttering uselessly over the body that lies crumpled; a dead doxy, torn from its tree.
His own breath hitches; of course, the damp dungeon air is terrible for his lungs – his physician had warned him most severely about that – but young blood blooms on uncaring stone.
He lays one hand lightly on the boy's neck and feels his pulse jump and flutter in protest. The relief lives a mayfly's moment.
He is struck by the contrast between his own, manicured, slightly plump flesh and the delicate arch of the neck it rests on; paper white and paper thin and so terribly vulnerable.
He chokes on his thoughts, snatching back his hand as if he had smudged an icon's glass. The boy's breath stutters and he stumbles on his own until it shifts once more into its harsh pattern.
Rended by agony. No, not fragile. The blood blossoms from wounds torn into a body wracked by convulsions and he closes his eyes, as if that thin veil of blood and tissue could conceal him from a world, and a world from him.
An age ago he had seen such things; a law enforcement officer policing a world blighted by Him often had into his hands pass things that in another time would make an Auror blanch.
When had that man gone? When had one who stared unflinchingly at bodies torn by shattering bones been smothered by plumpness and silliness and the wiles of sycophants and flatterers? When had the man who would throw himself into a curse's path rather than let another suffer, been eaten by one who would cower in a corner and mourn a bowler hat to block out the screams of a child whom he had sacrificed on the pyre of his ambition?
When had he come to prefer the company of flatterers to friends?
The boy breathes; he takes of his outer robe dampened by clammy air and tucks it round him. He shivers in the sudden chill but there is a new rekindled warmth inside his breast to stave it off. He settles by the child and waits for dawn.