Her mind wanders to him more often than his wanders to her, but not even she is masochistic enough to count the days that he is gone.

She does not deny herself the pleasure of missing him, though, because there is a perfect kind of ache that only comes from pining for someone that you don’t know when — or if — they’ll ever come back. Romanticizing their own twisted kind of intimacy is a pattern that is easy to fall back into, especially when there is no one else around suitable enough to use as a placeholder. She has been so good about that lately — letting herself remain untouched and sitting with her boredom, retracing old memories and letting her longing build.

But then magic found her, and suddenly missing him morphed into almost dreading him.

She cannot fully articulate why she thinks he will be irritated by the discovery; she only knows that somehow having magic feels like a betrayal, like she is knowingly toying with the power dynamic they have perfected over the years. She tells herself that he must know she would never think she could use her magic against him, but she remembers too how quickly he had bled her out on the mountain just for the simple fact that she had climbed it.

When she feels that long-awaited pull from him, it is fear that leaps into her throat first, and she cannot even recall the last time that had happened.

Outwardly, she is the same as he had last left her: golden halo and angel-wings that spill stardust, radiating that same honeyed glow and looking at him with those same nearly-black eyes that stare at him with both reverence and trepidation. But the magic hums like a current of electricity in her veins, and she knows that he senses it.

She sees the blood that stains his familiar lips, and it is a strange thing, the way jealousy still manages to flare up through the fear. It pulls her focus from his wine-red eyes for only a moment before she shoves the emotion to a far corner of her mind, along with all the other cobwebbed things she doesn’t like to think about.

“Carnage,” she says his name almost like an apology, all too aware of the space between them. This is usually where she would say she had missed him, and likely would have touched him just because she knew he would let her. But she sees the tension in his jaw and instead stays still, her pulse steadily rising like a slow flood. “It wasn’t on purpose,” she says softly, imploringly, yet she finds that she is more afraid that he will not even think her worth punishing and will instead just disappear.

She does not know if it is real or imagined, that she can feel him forcing himself into her mind, but she flinches as if it is a physical pain all the same. She doesn’t move away, though, doesn’t do anything to try and keep him out — thinking that maybe if he can see how willingly she still lets him take whatever he wants from her that he will see that she is still the same as she has always been, magic or not. Always a willing victim, ready to play whatever game he has created, to morph herself into the piece he needs her to be.

“I didn’t want you to be mad at me,” she says quietly, aware of how stupidly childish the statement sounds. She knows that she cannot hide anything from him. She knew that this very interaction was inevitable, that the only way to avoid it would have been for him to lose interest in her entirely and for their paths to never again cross. And she knows that if given the choice, she would choose exactly where they are now, because she would rather be wilting beneath his cold stare than to be forgotten like all the rest.

At least with him here in front of her there is a chance of rectifying her wrong, if only she can figure out exactly the way she needs to bleed to earn his forgiveness.

But something in his next statement stings, and she can feel her own jaw clench. Not in anger, but at the ache that swells in her chest, tightening in her throat. You were better, before. That always seems to be the way of it, and she has heard some iteration of it from others. She was always better to them when she was smaller, milder, weaker. She always did something that caused their interest to wane or for them to realize she cannot fit into their idyllic fantasy forever because she is horribly, irrevocably flawed.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his magic that he controlled her with; and she thinks he knows that, is sure that he must know by now it’s not in fear of his godhood that she falls before him, is sure that he must know that she worships at an entirely different altar than the rest of this place. It’s why, in her mind, her magic does not matter, because even if everything was stripped away from both of them he would always be the sun to her.

“You didn’t say that when I suddenly became an angel,” she manages, trying to smooth the hurt from her voice, trying to hold his gaze even though hers longs to drop away. She knows she is walking a fragile line, that he is already angered and likely not in the mood for her questioning anything, but the air between them is now fraught with the kind of tension she knew she had no choice but to push against until it snapped. “Why is this so different?”

That wretched heart of hers flutters when he tells her she was always meant to be an angel, because she still remembers the way she had felt when the change took place; how she had felt like an imposter knowing that she is anything but heavenly,  yet also how she had so desperately hoped that he would like it. To hear him say it felt like a validation she had not realized she had been craving all this time, a question that she had been too afraid to ask, even though she knew if he hadn’t liked it he would have fixed it — would have torn off her wings or demanded that she do it herself, and he would not have had to ask her twice.

Over time that reverent side of her has not lessened, but has instead grown stronger, nurtured by year after year of this macabre romance, until he is like a blade in her chest that she did not know how to live without, afraid that removing him would bleed her dry rather than save her.

But she is changed in other ways, no longer quite so content to walk this world as any of those older, weaker versions of herself. This has nothing to do with him and everything to do with her, because she has never viewed anything he did to her as something worthy of seeking vengeance.

The rules of their game did not make sense to anyone besides them, and the longer they played the less she found herself willing to be a pawn to anyone else.

With every new iteration of herself she is learning that she did not have to be.

Once he touches her, though, all other thoughts slip to the wayside.
She forgets her magic, and almost (almost)  forgets that he is displeased. She thinks only of how long it's been since she last felt him, the way he makes her breath catch as his mouth traces a familiar path across her pale skin, the way she forgets to be afraid. It is a reflex to reach back, to run her lips across his shoulder, to recall how he smells of everywhere and nowhere all at once, but also just distinctly him.

“I missed you, too,” she breathes, not caring if he is lying (because she is not). His tone is too saccharine, but she ignores it. He has been sweet to her before, so that in itself does not raise alarms. The honeyed thickness to his voice is what makes her feel as though he is trying to lure her into some kind of trap, but she is too busy committing his touch to memory to pay that stirring of unease in her chest any mind.

But the sensation of him pulling at her threads of magic is enough to rouse her from the haze she found herself in, though she does not pull away from him, does not break contact when she asks, a soft whisper across his skin, “what are you doing?”

She notices the way his own breath catches at her touch, and if they were under different circumstances she might have taken a moment to revel in that.

The imbalance that existed between them extended beyond the magic they each had; she loves him and he cannot love her, and she has learned to accept instead being wanted by him. And yet there is nothing she wants more (and she wants so many things, one of her countless flaws) than to feel as if she has a piece of him just as he has a piece of her, no matter how small it may be. To know that there is a reason that even in the infinite expanse of time that he possesses that she still crosses his mind, however erratic and fleeting, and reminds him to come back.

But given their current position—she curled against him, and he wrapped around her magic—she does not allow herself to savor the satisfaction, her attention tunneled to only one thing.  She knows now that her punishment has already begun, knows based on the way he constricts tighter and tighter around the object of his ire. There is a small part of her that wants to pull away, to try and sever the grip he has on her magic. She wants to be selfish; she wants to keep this power, wants to revolt against him just to see how far she would get. But she so rarely disobeyed him, and she knows him well enough to recognize that this is only the beginning of how he will express his displeasure with her.

And the part of her that does not want him to stop touching her is stronger—always.

His words are warm against her skin, and heat floods her blood, rising to the surface to meet his lips. He has a hold on more than just her magic, and even if somewhere in the back of her mind she wants to plead with him to not take it, those words never have a chance to make it to her tongue. Her magic is merely an extension of herself, and every part of her wants him in this moment, and she can almost feel the gilded threads giving themselves over to him when she sighs a breathy, nearly inaudible acquiescence against his shoulder.

She is accustomed to pain, in both the literal and figurative sense.
She has lost her eyes and her heart, she has been killed and revived, she has felt the keen sting of betrayal and heartbreak, and still nothing could prepare her for what it felt like to have magic ripped from her. It reminded her almost of what it had felt like to be burned by stars, if the stars had been a living thing entwined with her own blood. The pain radiated from a place that she could not name — it was everywhere all at once, relentless and constant, stealing her breath. She wants to beg him to stop; the pleas are there but they turn to ash in her throat, either because she physically cannot speak them, or because she knows it will be over faster if she does not resist.

When he is finished, she feels strangely hollow.
She had not realized how much space magic took up, and is even more surprised by the sorrow that quickly surges forward to fill the emptiness it had left behind. She has never been the kind to long for power; for most of her life she had been unassuming and plain. But she hated this new feeling of weakness, as if all her armor has been stripped from her and she has been left entirely defenseless.

His touch is the only thing that distracts her from these thoughts, like a balm to where the absence of magic still aches, and in the glow of his praise the rest of it disappears. She wants to ask him how she can earn it back, as she has done with the other things he has taken, but something tells her now is not the time. She can be patient — she waits for him for months, sometimes years, and she tells herself that she can wait for this, too. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you,” she says, sweeping her lips along his neck, and despite the melancholy that sits behind her ribs, she means it. “It wasn’t intentional. I just don’t always know how to find you.”