moonshadows

The viewing screen on his desk displays the public room of her apartment, but he is not looking at it. His attention is on the monitoring node nestled inside the layered veils and illusions that make her look human, watching silently as she follows her guards back through the corridors that lead from Joshua’s living quarters to hers. He’d thought that being able to keep tabs on her would reassure him. That it would be a suitable weapon with which to slay the nagging fear that despite everything, she will not return to him. Somehow, this has not been the case.

She looked so happy. So comfortable. Why would she ever want to return to me, when all I do is make unreasonable demands of her? I use her shamelessly. I make choices for her. And when she complies, I repay her with sharp words in a harsh tone. She should flee while she has the chance.

He knows that if she did flee, he would track her down as she showed him, and bring her back by any means necessary. He also knows that he is being unreasonable towards himself, but he can’t help it. Like an animal confined for far too long in a cage too small, he gnaws at himself when there is no other outlet for his nervous energy, and he has neatly reduced himself to a twitching, bleeding wreck.

Again.

She’s approaching her door now, and suddenly he needs to see her smile, to feel her hands against him. Quickly, he keys in the sequence that locks the guards’ screen. If he times this just right…

The door has just swung shut and she is halfway to her bedroom when he steps out of the Twisting Nether behind her. Before he can say anything, she whirls around with a happy little gasp and a smile that says the rest of the world just ceased to exist for me; you are all that matters. Instead of soothing the bleeding places in his psyche, however, the devoted expression stings and causes fresh bleeding. He doesn’t deserve such adoration; he is a monster. Not only that, but he is undoubtedly ruining her life by-

The thought gets cut off as she flings herself joyfully into his arms. In a flash, he is holding her tightly with his head bowed so that he can smell the alien floral scent of her hair.

“Oh, Illidan, it was so good to see Grandma and Grandpa again! And Uncle Josh said he invited you to come with me in two weeks.” She looks up at him pleadingly. “You will come to dinner with us, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

The words are out of his mouth before he has had a chance to process what she’s actually asked. Not that he would have said no to this request, but it surprises him just how deep the desire goes to do something, anything, for her. To make her give him the adoration he does not deserve. Oh, he is a horrible person for demanding her affection this way – but her squeal of delight loosens the knot of guilt in his chest before it can start strangling him. He’s not accustomed to having said the right thing or chosen the correct course of action, but it seems that with her, anything he says is the right thing to say, and no matter what he does, it is never wrong in her eyes. It’s a little disorienting; he keeps waiting for it to all come crashing down around his ears as it has so many times before.

Gentle fingers on his horns cause the self-destructive thoughts to still. “They’re dry,” she says softly, the barest hint of an offer in her tone.

Right now, he doesn’t care that she likely saw his weakness and is deliberately offering him an opportunity for her to do whatever she does that takes the pain away. He seizes the opening as though it had been his plan all along. “With our…bonding session…being disrupted tomorrow, I thought it would be best to get the oiling taken care of tonight.”

“Of course,” she chirps happily, squirming gently out of his grasp to fetch the bottle.

In moments, he is seated on the couch and sunk into blissful numbness. After the week he’s had, the pleasure of not having to deal with his broken psyche is beyond description. Her fingers promise gentle oblivion, and he takes it gratefully.

While her hands move of their own accord to rub the lightly-spiced oil into his horns, she slips a mental tendril past his defenses and sprays anesthetic foam all over the interior of his mind. After the week he’s had, she wants to make absolutely sure that nothing’s broken and bleeding where she can’t see it.

The usual damage is repaired within seconds – she really needs to figure out an elastic bond for that – and she moves on to structures that haven’t been broken in a while. Fixing them is easy, however – they broke cleanly – and she adds some ties to them just in case she has to repair them again in the future. Nothing else seems too terribly damaged; the barricades are holding, the sense of responsibility is still healing well, the rage slumbers inside its pen, and whatever’s sealed beneath she’s just a child is still firmly sealed.

Looks like I’ve got time to try to make some headway.

She switches to the native visualization and turns her attention to the battered, chipped statues that dot his mental landscape. It won’t be hard to pick out the stone chips from the rest of the debris that litters the ground, but the broken bits and the statues themselves will need to be cleaned before she can even start trying to figure out which pieces go to which statue. There’s moss growing on several – an unhealthy-looking, almost malevolent moss – and nasty unidentified gunk built up nearly every place the moss isn’t. Initially, she’d thought the statues were carved from a dark stone, but on closer examination she realizes they’re white marble. This is going to take a lot of cleaning.

Should she start with the pieces first, or the statues themselves? The pieces will be easier to clean, but he won’t experience any benefit from that until they’re re-attached. With a mental sigh, she concentrates on the end and lets the visualization provide the means. She has no idea what the bubbling, sparkling liquid in the bucket is, aside from some kind of cleaning solution. This is why she hardly ever uses the native visualization; she much prefers actually knowing what she’s doing. Well, she supposes rubbing effervescent fluid on a soiled statue is easier than sorting out broken, rusted machinery. A small veil serves quite well as a cleaning rag; she dips it into the bucket and begins dabbing at the statue that looks vaguely familiar. Rather than dissolving the stuff staining the surface, the bubbly liquid seems to neutralize it. Just as well, she doesn’t think having that stuff soak into the ground would be a good idea.

Okay, this is going to take a while.

Several minutes of rubbing at what she thinks is the statue’s face has resulted only in a lightening of the caked-on stain. Whatever the built-up crud represents, it’s been there a long time, and it’s going to take an equally long time to clean up. Well, she knew it would take a while for him to be healed of everything he’d suffered, and this statue is the most damaged, so repairing it is bound to have the greatest impact. She wishes she could figure out who it’s of, though. The entire head is battered so badly that most of the face is gone. It’s also got the most creepy moss on it. Concentrating on the end again manifests a spray-bottle of…she has no idea what it is, but it glows faintly lilac. A few tentative spritzes, and the soaked moss writhes and withers before her astonished eyes.

The stain can wait.

Before she abandons the bubbly bucket in favor of the withering spray, she picks up a few chips of soiled stone and drops them into the effervescent fluid. If this test works, she’ll clean the loose pieces by leaving them in the bucket while she scrubs the statues and the cleaning will get done in half the time. For now, though, she’s going to spray this lavender stuff all over the moss and delight in its agonized death.

When the first patch is completely withered, she wipes the stone down with the soaked veil and is rewarded with a hand-sized patch of mostly-clean stone. She looks at the bottle in awe. Still no idea what the glowing stuff actually is, but for results like this, she could learn to love this visualization. As much as she wants to spend the rest of the night killing moss, they both need to sleep before their spellcasting tomorrow, and she’s already been in here for a while. The spray bottle is dismissed and the stone bits fished out of the bucket. They’re measurably cleaner, which is a relief. She sets them by the statue’s left foot and dismisses the bucket before slipping back out of his mind.

He returns to awareness suddenly the instant her hands leave his horns. Deeply relaxed, yes, and not in the slightest bit of pain, but there is no haze of pleasant numbness like there has been in the past. He feels like a nightsaber: capable and confident should anything threaten him, but otherwise too comfortable to bother moving. The slight stiffness of his muscles hints that she’s taken longer this session than she has before, so perhaps whatever she does that results in a ‘good mood’ has already worn off. Still, for him to feel this good even after the ‘good mood’ has faded…there is no doubt in his mind that she is somehow healing him.

After ten thousand years, I am finally being given my due. A soft chuckle escapes him as he stands up and catches her wrist before she can put the oil away. She snuggles up against him without needing to be urged, and he indulges himself by running his fingers through her hair and across her cheek. Yes…finally, someone appreciates everything I have done. Oh, my young Champion – someday I will be able to tell you how much this means to me. But not now, not yet.

“Sleep,” he says quietly. “You will need your strength for tomorrow.”

He slips back through the Twisting Nether and stretches out on the cool silk sheets of his bed. The fabric warms beneath his body and although the barriers hold, his dreams are of an unseen figure, all soft skin and long hair that slides over him in a waterfall caress.