She remembers how she had felt in the afterlife when she had been faced with Dhumin, and how she had felt like every mistake she had ever made was written across her skin like an open book for him to read. She remembers how they had not seemed like mistakes until that very moment, when she was standing before someone that was going to judge her for them – the very person that was going to analyze every sin, and she knew him well enough to know he would seek some kind of retribution. Guilt had flooded her, until she was afraid she would drown in it, followed closely by shame; shame because all of her trysts were only because someone was bored. She had let herself be degraded to nothing more than a mere tool for them to use, and she had thought, maybe, that she would try and be different.
Until the atmosphere of this meeting shifted.
Until she recognizes the way his eyes sharpen onto her in a different form, and she would be lying if she said it wasn’t exactly what she had wanted.
Because try as she might, she cannot change the very core of who she was. Though a halo glowed above her head and the sunlight glinted off the gilded feathers of her angel-wings, she would let him – or any of them – extinguish every part of her light if it was what they asked of her.
He is next to her then, and it never occurs to her to flinch away, even though she had caught the glint of his sharpened teeth. She only watches him with that erratic, jumping pulse, and a shiver races across her back during that moment where he hovers just above her skin before touching her. She trembles again where his touch lands, moving across the broken, bruised skin near her wing, and she can feel the heat that simmers achingly beneath the surface. The endless black of his coat beckons her but she doesn’t reach out; not yet. “A curse of being alive, I suppose,” she manages to murmur, but when his teeth press into the porcelain-white of her flesh she involuntarily sucks in a sharp breath.
