Asphodel is not stupid.
She knows he doesn't stare too long at his crystals or meet her gaze, or even look in a mirror too long, for fear that he will have pleading green eyes staring back at him, not blue. You have no power over me, no power, no power, no power.
She knows he refuses to eat peaches on all but the most special, lonely occasions he has talked himself into believing are unavoidable—her birthdays, the day she graduates college, the day she marries, the birth of her first daughter, the day she dies.
She knows why he doesn't like to dance, hasn't since before he met her but after her—the one time she prevailed on him he spent the entire time looking for somebody who wasn't there and she knows, knows, that he's looking for some lingering, last imprint of her, perhaps leaning against a pillar or sitting at a table—doesn't like her to wear white—it's not your color, he tells her and she agrees because it's hers, isn't it?
She knows that when sleep evades him it's not her name he's whispering into the dark, it's hers, always Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, where are you, where are you, come back come back, and then, I would do anything for you over and over and over again until he almost has himself believing it.
Because Asphodel is not stupid and knows, it hurts when he leans over her, tangling his fists in her hair and taking her lips with his in a kind of quiet desperation.
It hurts because she knows that he paints her blue eyes as bright green, he sees her light hair darkened to almost-black and he envisions her as a dead little human girl.
It hurts because she knows that in the private corners of his mind, she's not dressed as a queen in regal silks and velvets and furs, but as a middle-class girl from Above in trousers and a vest and a smudge of dirt—or maybe it's courage.
It hurts because sometimes, every now and then, he'll get her name wrong, showering her with epithets that were never hers, but rather hers.
Precious thing, love, my darling, girl, angel, beloved.
It hurts most when it's
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.
And not
Asphodel, Asphodel, Asphodel.
But she moves her mouth against his in what she hopes in a pleasing manner and she tries to raise their son in a manner that Jareth would approve of and she doesn't fight when he names their first daughter Sarah.
And when he looks at her and sees their daughter's namesake, she tries not to mind.