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[powerhungry]

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SILCO

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[powerhungry]

[ He doesn't answer her straight away. For a stretch, there's just silence — or rather, the sound of his footsteps, heavier than they usually are, taking them both down the hall.

The light in the planetarium is a dreamy purple when he carries her inside, nudging the door open with his shoulder and letting it fall closed behind him as he moves them toward one of the two-seaters. The pale hue of the fabric changes with the shifting of the false sky, the shifting of the painted stars and planets. It's plush, soft, giving way without protest under Shadowheart's weight. As good a temporary reprieve as any other place in the manor. His hands only leave her once he's certain she's settled. ]

If it's what you really want—

[ And he's not certain it is, not really. But that's not what he says, and it's the sound of tearing fabric that fills the room, first. A ribbon of fabric ripping free of his shirt, long enough to bind around her opened knuckles. ]

—ask me for it again.

[nightsung]

[ It's not the soft balm of healing magic, but there's something in the simplicity of this--Silco winding fabric around broken skin, her knuckles raw and stinging--that feels right to Shadowheart, somehow. To be so in her body, to feel the hurt of it rather than whatever numbness took her through the depths of the Shadowfell.

Under any other circumstances, their positions would be reversed. She's offered her magic to him, hasn't she? Her strength, fleeting it seems; her time and effort at Hex Club. Still, none of those things truly cost her anything. She could have kept Silco at a distance, before tonight.

It's a threshold crossed, but there are others still. Too tender to ask him to stay with her here, while she rests, without some other form of transaction. Shame edges into her body through her fever-flush and her bloodied hands, the skin that will knit itself back together and the one dark wound that might not ever heal.

There's a night sky wheeling overhead, still unfamiliar to her. Shadowheart turns onto her side, cheek against a soft pillow, to look at Silco rather than the stars, catch his wrist again before he can pull away.

What does she want? To understand, when Shar has always left her in the dark. To see the path forward. To remember.

She can't ask for any of these things. ]

Punish me.

[ Her eyes are rimmed dark with smeared shadow, holding Silco's gaze until she brings his hand to her lips, brushing them over his knuckles with a soft scrape of teeth. ]

Please.