Super•Villainous

XX

"I think I'm dying."

I wasn't even aware I spoke aloud until Shade replied in his coldly amused way, "A bit dramatic, don't you think?"

"No." I swallowed thickly. "No, I really can't move anymore. I'm... I'm done."

He knelt before me. "Here. Have an ice cube."

Despite myself, I let out a pained laugh. He was treating me like a horse he could goad into doing tricks with the promise of bits of sugar.

"I don't think ice will solve this problem," I said, accepting the sphere into my mouth regardless. Truthfully, it did make me feel marginally better, temporarily subduing the repressive heat that had been growing since dawn. "I've pushed my body harder these last couple days than I've ever done in my life, without any food to fuel it. I can't keep this up forever. I just — I can't."

"You're going to give up when you're so close?" I heard the judgement in his voice, as though to say, 'I thought better of you'.

His provocations failed to fill my limbs with outraged strength the way they used to. I simply couldn't move, not for myself, not for anyone else, not even to spite him.

Honestly, I'd wasted enough energy on him — my enemy — and all his taunts, his cryptic non-answers, so I didn't feel bad about not responding, when even moving my tongue around words proved too daunting a task, the effort indescribable. Too tired to speak, to move, to think and to breathe.

Maybe I'd die in that spot, or maybe I would wake up tomorrow miraculously rejuvenated, ready to carry on. Maybe, maybe, maybe... So many maybes.

Without warning, I felt pressure under my ribs, and then on my thigh as he whisked me off the ground. A gasp involuntarily fled my lips at the impact of my stomach colliding with his shoulder, and although I never particularly fantasized about being carried by a man, if I had, I liked to have imagined that my expectations of the experience would have differed from my reality. Perhaps a bride lovingly carried through the threshold of her new marriage home. Being carted around like a sack of potatoes, my top half flung over the back of a man I despised probably wouldn't have made the final cut.

My protests at this breech of dignity got lost somewhere between my brain and my mouth, fizzing out like a spark on too thin a trail of gunpowder.

I wanted to ask why, for the thousandth time, why?

Tell me what you want from me, and why you haven't just taken it?

I stood no chance of stopping him, we both knew that much. He had every opportunity available to him to take and take and take and never stop taking until I was dead, yet he didn't. At the very least, instead of tiring himself out by trekking through the woods with me over his shoulder, he could have teleported us wherever he pleased. Realistically, he could have done that long before now. At any point during our time there.

None of those thoughts made way to sound. They stayed, swirling torrentially around my head as though in a stoppered bottle I couldn't open.

"Open up," he'd occasionally murmur, forcing ice cubes past my chapped lips.

Open up, open up...

The fatigue keeping my words contained held strong, so inside they stayed.

During my intermittent forays into the waking world, my senses dulled, narrowing around the constant, rhythmic sound of his heartbeat pressed against my ear, the slight whooshing of his cloak flapping around his knees, the predictability of his breathing that lulled me in and out of sleep like a loud, ticking clock.