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When one night he softly knocks on the door of her room at an inn and quielty asks if he can sit with her for a moment, she doesn’t say no. She expects him to talk; there is a thousand unsaid words behind the sluggish movements of his limbs and the unflinching expression on his face as he sits down on the bed next to her, but minutes pass and neither says nothing. He has his elbows propped up on his knees, fingers laced in front of his mouth; she watches him from the corner of her eye while her hands continue cleaning her swords, and his eyes don’t twitch from the wall he’s staring at.
Finally she puts her weapons aside. “Did you need anything?”
It’s a couple seconds before he shrugs, just slightly, and even more before he speaks up.
“Do you think I made the right choice today?” he asks, face still dead, and she feels a pang of unease of how often that happens now; day after day he grows colder, more pragmatic, and she’s proud of him for how quickly he’s learning-
She doesn’t answer.
Instead she puts a hand on his shoulder and he flinches, entire body flailing and retreating at sudden contact. At least he’s looking at her now, his face a mix of shock and offense, and she squeezes comfortingly. “Jazbay, there was no better choice to be made.”
He inhales raspily, corners of his mouth twitching, and he whips his head to look at the wall again. "Which means it wasn’t right.”
“What else would you have done, then? You chose to sacrifice few to save many. You were quick. They felt no pain. Jazbay,” she says with more urgency as his breathing grows more labored, “this was the best you could do."
She gently pulls him towards her, hand moving from his shoulder to his neck, and his face is completely blank as he lets her gently pull him down to rest his head on her knee. Long minutes go by before he moves at all, to raise his feet off the floor and curl up to fit on the bed, and throughout it she keeps a gentle hand on his neck, feeling his breath slow down and go quiet and even. At the back of her head, she observes how thin his neck is under her strong fingers, and how little it would take now to kill him.
To kill the world.
“You did something magnificient today,” she says softly. And there’s that pang again - she has no words to soften the cruelty of this sentence. He committed murder, a truly amazing one, and fate had it that he was going to have to commit more. If he came into her room to escape from what the gods chose for him, he shouldn’t have; Jenassa wasn’t going to let herself shield the boy from who Skyrim needed him to be.
(Even though he deserves that, he deserves something different than this. He deserves the smell of temple incense clinging to his hair after a day spent on mending and healing. He deserves lavender and Elves' Ears leaves spilling through his fingers, and he deserves books, rolls of parchment falling off his desk, and teachers who won't tell him he is destined for strife. He deserves to pray, but she's seen him swallow words like glass when she'd stop before wayshrines.)
(She catalogues the evil thoughts as calmly as ever, away with all the brutal observations and whispers that come to her without her will. She wonders, sometimes, if she was always like this; if there was once a wild-haired Dunmer child who stroked her beloved dog and thought about how it would never expect it if she put her small knife through its eye, a young woman who would be drinking wine with her friends and think I could paint my walls with your blood and you'd never see it coming. Or if these thoughts only came after she plunged her sword into her cousin's back, blinked away his blood from her eyes as her entire clan screamed and lunged from their seats, but they didn't stop her, they couldn't have stopped her.)
"Sometimes," he says quietly, but nowhere near to sleepy, "I think--"
(They're just thoughts. Having them is nothing like making them happen. She's done both, and she knows the difference. She will tell him sometime.)
She runs her fingers through the boy's hair.
(Cruel gods willing, he will see for himself.)