There is a shadow of confusion that befalls her face at his answer, because the words are wrapped in an almost kindness. She overlooks the fact that she spent so long in the darkness because of him. There is a thought somewhere in the back of her mind, a gnawing thing that makes her wonder why this time is different. Last time, he had ripped her eyes out and disappeared. Last time, she had been left broken and bleeding in the middle of a kingdom that was plunged into chaos, while she plummeted only into darkness.
He had not fixed her, he had not saved her. He had left her in the darkness, and still, she had never hated him.
And now, she finds some sort of strange trust in him, because he has drowned her and brought her back, he has touched her in a watered-down memory of the Valley, and they linger now, covered and surrounded by stars. She is foolish and reckless and incapable of grounding herself with logic and reason, especially with his mouth moving along her back. “I did miss the stars,” she affirms softly, not trusting herself to say much else.
She doesn’t have a chance to protest when he says you should feel them, and she knows from experience it would have been a useless plea anyway. The stars suddenly alight from the inside out, white hot and searing beneath her skin, her blood boiling with the strength of an entire galaxy. She burns, until it is all that she knows, until she is afraid it will never stop, until she wishes she was drowning instead. She wants to beg him to make it stop, but her throat is closed and raw and only strangled cries escape. He can still hear her; she knows he can hear her mind screaming, and she knows every plea and prayer will go unanswered until he decides to be done.
Finally, it ends, and she is left shuddering and gasping, with tears streaked down her delicate face. Her heart races uncontrollably, trapped in an adrenaline high spiked by the pain and by fear and by a tangled, inexplicable want. She finds his shoulder with her lips, as though he is somehow her savior and salvation, rather than her tormentor. She trembles there, the stars across her skin glittering and rippling, and there is a choked laugh when she remembers what he had said just moments before when she was still burning. “I don’t know that I am,” she tries to brush it off, tries to not get lost in that need to please him, to find more ways to earn that subtle praise. “Because I still don’t entirely know or understand what you want from me.” She says it, even though she knows she will never understand. It would never be black and white; it would never be clean-cut, and it would never make sense to anyone except them.
