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Ever since you were gifted the power that made you the Greatest Warrior in the Galaxy, no one has ever touched you. No one has gotten close.
Even when you were young, when your wings were still growing in - the memories of which are muddy and distant like a long-forgotten dream, you hated being touched. Though you were enthusiastic and eager to please your superiors, the sensation of other people’s hands and clothes burned on your skin, so you avoided contact wherever you could. You never got along with the other soldiers your age, anyways.
The only time people would touch you was in a battle. Your wariness to being touched didn’t matter in close combat. Though, in the years after the Accident and before you were sealed into limbo for all eternity, no one could even come close to you without being violently torn apart by the power that now took up residence in your body. So, you isolated yourself to protect the people of Halcandra that you cared about. You had no business trying to get close to them anymore if your mere presence was a danger.
Recently, the closest anyone has come to touching you was that orange butterfly drifting down on your lance, before an incomprehensible force shattered the chains that bound you to eternal damnation and dragged you down to Hades, so no one could ever try to hurt or touch you again.
Your companion here says that this place you’re in now doesn’t quite have a proper name - some people call it Hades, some people call it paradise, some people call it hell. It isn’t a place of suffering, but it isn’t an eternal paradise of sunshine and rainbows either. It’s dark, like a land covered in a permanent eclipse, and there’s butterflies everywhere.
It’s better than a suffocating crystal that exists nowhere in time and space. You can’t leave this place, not really, but frankly you can’t really give a shit at this point either. Your future is the last thing on your mind.
When you first came here, your mind was almost nonexistent, filled only with the instinct to attack and destroy everything around you. Slowly, you came down from your millenia-long adrenaline high, and all you could feel was an exhaustion that permeated every single fiber of your being, and you couldn’t move, not from being frozen in a timeless crystal but now from being totally drained of any mental energy to speak of, not even able to form a coherent thought.
And slowly, very slowly, the energy trickled back. You’re still exhausted - so, so exhausted. But you can think, and move, and sometimes you feel as though you can feel something other than dull tiredness.
Your… friend? is a lithe figure named Morpho Knight that dons intricate red armor and beautiful robes that bear the colors of fall and darkness. You’re not really quite sure what to make of them yet - somehow, they are the butterfly that brought you here, a force somewhat beyond your comprehension. They don’t seem to bear ill will towards you - probably the opposite, in fact, if they were able to shatter the seal that locked you in limbo and bring you to a safe place without asking for much in return. A shard of your seemingly infinite power was more than enough for them.
Sometimes, they leave for a period of time - they seem like they’re busy with duties of some sort, though you don’t understand what those duties are. They seem distant and detached, somehow, like they’re not quite all the way real, but they’re kind to you. When they’re here, they sit with you, usually in silence, but sometimes they tell you things, about this place you’re both in, about the things they’ve seen in their travels, and the two of you talk about your life, the events and the trauma and pain that led you here, which you recount with emotionless, exhausted indifference. They never say anything about themself. And they don’t touch you, either.
There’s one day where they come back and sit with you and they don’t say anything.
This is a day you’ve been trying to mentally prepare yourself for, to answer a curiosity that’s been nagging in the back of your mind now that you’re away from the timeless void and the endless warring. You don’t want to be stuck as you are forever, and you’re scared of what might happen if you try to do this, but a little part of you is dead-set on it.
You sit up and look at them intently, catching their attention. You’ve never really looked closely at their face until now, but it’s a pretty face framed with curly black hair, two pure white eyes peering back at you.
You break eye contact with them almost immediately - their gaze is calm, but somehow it’s too intense. You breathe, deeply, trying to ground yourself.
“Can you…” You start, quietly, barely above a whisper. “Can you hold my hand? No one has ever…”
At first, Morpho seems a little confused at your request, and you mumble an apology - it’s a foolish idea, likely to get either you or them hurt in some way.
You don’t expect them to shift closer to you. Close enough for them to reach the hand held still at your side. Gently, they put their hand in yours.
Their touch is warm, the fabric of their gloves is soft. You recoil slightly, at first, but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Your whole arm tickles with electricity that quickly dissipates once you relax and adjust to the sensation of their hand in yours.
And then it hits you like a brick wall.
No one has ever touched you .
The thought rolls around in your head like a stray marble, dredging up more echoes of feelings you’ve harbored deep in your heart. No one has ever touched you. No one has held a real conversation with you, no one has sat in silence with you, no one has shown you a shred of empathy, shown mercy, and dragged your damned soul out of the limbo that consumed you for eons.
No one should touch you. You’re dangerous, you’re a war machine, a destroyer of planets that’s slayed thousands for a lie that you lived your life in. You are the Greatest Warrior in the Galaxy.
Thunder cracks in your heart, and something aches deeply in your chest. You feel like you can hear Morpho calling your name, but you’re buried too deep in your own thoughts to register the fact.
Your face starts to sting. You’ve never felt that before.
“-Galacta-”
You move to reassure them that you’re fine, but involuntarily, you choke out a sob. Something is leaking out of your eyes. ...Tears? You’re torn between wanting to not feel anything at all and wanting to let everything out.
You make the mistake of looking at Morpho - they look so worried and frightened, like they’ve never felt it before, and you’re filled with guilt, and everything boils over.
The first thing you really register is an intense sadness, more potent than anything you’ve ever felt, though you don’t fully understand why you’re sad.
When you recounted your life story to Morpho, you felt nothing, like you were simply retelling a legend of old. All the grief that you’ve harbored in your heart, grief for what you could have been, is spilling out now. The thing to push you over the edge this time was not centuries’ worth of internalized suffering, or endless bloodbaths, but just the touch of someone you finally feel you can trust.
You’re crying - full-on sobbing into your hands, in absolute grief for the life that you could’ve had, instead of the cursed eternal existence of warring and destroying you were given. You shield your wings around your face in shame.
All you have now is a power you never wanted, and the butterfly knight that saved you.
You can’t tell how long you’ve been crying for, but when it’s over, the exhaustion hits you again. This time, it’s a relieved exhaustion, like the sun after a passing storm. This is the first time you’ve felt pain without inadvertently taking it out on everything around you.
Morpho puts their hand on your back, between where your wings sprout from. Their fingers part the feathers slightly. It doesn’t hurt or burn or make you flinch, it just feels gentle and real, more real than anything else you’ve felt.
You raise your wings, look at Morpho again.
“...Thank you.” You whisper.