"Don't Try to Pick Yourself Up From This Fall,"
He would hear her tell herself. A blackened heart smoulders in her palm, and she lets her bludgeoned lips hang open, giving her a look of sheer unintelligence. Her incontrollable mop of hair scratches her faces, but time has passed to such a point where she can no longer feel it. Her deep wounds have not healed but been torn farther and farther apart until, no longer, is there anything left to destroy. She is open to the pain and the raw cruelty she is dealt by the hour, armed with the knowledge that it will simply pass through her.
His reputation does not stem from being a destroyer of lives. He is admired indifferently through the eyes of wholesome nobodies, and occasionally angst-ridden obstacles. She was meant to just such as the latter, a matter which he usually hurdled over with ease. His usual callous charm and icy wit were more than sufficient for defeating those which were placed so far below him. But she, she laid her cards down before him with more than just hope – she had a burning determination so large, anyone in her path could feel the radiation of it from miles ahead. She went all-in without a second glance at her better options. And she had many.
It was the first time he could remember that unprovoked stupidity entranced him.
He never desired. Such a sensation could only reach him at the tips of his fingers, and it was always slipping away. He considered himself to be a lucky man; undefeatable without the curse of lust. He had, surely, once had the ability to love, but that had been shaken off and stored deep within him under a different name and purpose years ago. He was truly, honestly, painfully self-dependant, and he savoured in vain every moment of it.
To name himself a good man would be a lie, foolhardy and insulting on his own tongue. There were many that would argue, saying he achieved things far greater than any ruined man ever could, but they would be wrong. He was not wholly a ruined man; he was far beyond that, stretched out into endless territory he could not identify. He had done both too much and too little to be a good man – this was a widely accepted opinion of him, and perhaps the truest. But then, what was left? Was his name one that should be uttered in foreboding tones, which shot unprecedented pulses of angry through the purest man's veins? The scars he had scratched at and broken, opening the dangers floodgates of what he was capable of, was only the beginning of the long list of crimes that conceded with the point of him being anything but a good man.
But she would disagree.
It almost, almost brought a smile to his face as he thought this. It was a hard, honest truth, one of the few he could admit to himself. She, who had witnessed first hand the brunt of his rage, his bottomless hunger for just the taste of revenge, and his incalculable madness, could stand before any jury and vow that he was anything but a horrible man. It wasn't her naivety that would push her to speak these words, and think these thoughts; he knew as well as she did that such honourable traits were no longer identifiable to her. It was the one thing that drew him to her in the strongest of manners: her unjustifiable belief.
Not just in him, but in everything. When lightning struck her, she remained convinced that the thunder cloud had a silver lining. It disgusted him to the greatest of depths, but at the same time, unwillingly enthralling him, more than he every imagined anyone other than himself was able to do. This trait ... this twisted, unimaginable flaw she had bestowed deep within her soul, reminded him so closely of naiivity, but that it could not be. She had seen too much ... and what she had seen, she accepted.
She was so unlike the others, and for that, he could not keep away. For once, the barest of his instincts managed to grasp hold. Dangling on his tarnished strings, he could manage to relate to the girl.
But different as she may be, she would never be him.
And he was never very good at sympathy.