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The first time she meets him she is young, and the blood crusted below her fingernails crawls like tiny little worms that not even hours of scrubbing can get out. She cannot outrun who she is meant to be and she knows it, but he sits beside her as she screams, and he knows her.
The second time they meet he is young and lost, and does not even know himself let alone her. He thinks he will live forever. She knows he won’t.
The third time she seeks him out, a curious whim of an adult who has lived too long and done too much and he knows her. She sits beside him and eats the food he offers, drinks the wine he gives as he tells her of the nefarious deeds of Marquise Spinneret Mindfang with a worn fondness in his eyes. By the time she must leave again, his cold highblood skin is warm where their elbows touched.
The fourth time they meet she knows Mindfang and wishes she didn’t. He is young and in love for the first time, a pitch black flame burning for an untameable cerulean, alight with the kind of passion she knows will consume him in the end. He doesn’t know her, not really, and she wishes she has the courage to stop him.
The fifth time they meet it is almost dawn, and he knows her. He speaks with a reverence unfamiliar to her, face alight in the green moon’s shine and eyes bright with something she thinks she recognises as he clumsily holds her hand, and she loves him.
The sixth time they meet precedes the fifth by days, as she dances through the ashes of a battlefield with blood on her hands while he watches from the sidelines, eyes only on her. He does not know her then, not really, but she knows him and the moment they have shared, and she shines brighter for it.
She loses track then, somewhere between the fifth and the third meeting. Sixty-three moments of various lengths, stolen over a hundred sweeps. There is no chronology to it, because she is ingrained into the timeline and bound to her master’s whims, but he never asks. He never judges the bloodstains on her dress, and on the nights where what is left of her conscience catches up with her he is her anchor, even bathed in blood and cruelty as he is, and she loves him.
Time runs out.
The seventieth time she sees him he is dead. She knows, as she stares down at his bruised and broken face in the fading moonlight, that there are no more moments to be stolen, no more chances to go back to see him alive and breathing without compromising the timeline. And yet she wishes.
She wishes that the Demoness brought more than just death with her touch.
