You are mine.
Three words and they were knit and drawn up together forever. She turned her neck towards a glint of sunlight, and the window to where her eyes glanced was wrapped in wood. He followed her eyes, but brought his lips to the sunlight and swallowed it in darkness.
"Your head is covered in bark," she whispered, and laughed. "I'm sorry, but I just realized, that's what Guado skin is like. It's like bark."
"You are strange, Yuna," he breathed in frustration, and the skin beneath his lips moved in a swallow. A thousand questions arched across his throat - did she think him rotten and full of insects, did she see him a hollow home for woodpeckers, or did she wish, then, to tear him all apart and build a boat from his leather-bark-skin?
But he said nothing because her palm lay flat across his forehead and white magic licked through the crown of veins. And in that moment he realized he had not swallowed the sunlight off her neck, but had in fact bathed in it himself - and as he opened his eye like a slat and looked towards the window, he saw that it was wrapped in wood.
You are mine.
Though the cracks in his skin were obvious enough to see, and as desperately as she tried to heal them - they would never fully fade away; she, too had cracks. And the longer he peered at her with his whirlpool eyes that sucked out all the light in the world, he knew that she was slowly slipping apart, cracks that appeared and opened by his command, yewling and snapping wide-open and raw.
He promised to catch her green-blue eyes when the marbles fell right out of her head. She thanked him.
You are mine.
You are mine.
You are mine.
"You know, you're… not like Lord Zaon."
"Hm?"
"You always… compared yourself to Lord Zaon, when you proposed to me - ah! - because you said my father named me after Lady Yunalesca."
"Please, what is your point?"
"Their love was kind."
And he laughed, then, and kissed her neck and lips once if not twice and said in a hollow way, "You will never fail to surprise me, Lady Yuna."
"Their love was holy."
And she was everything holy in the world to him. Everything sacred, everything worth living for lurked beneath her pyrefly eyes that he would catch and crush like marbles in his hands. He had asked her once if she thought the stars were made of pyreflies, and she had asked him if they could send him.
If they could send the stars.
"Their love was beautiful."
His claws held her cheek, and whirlpool met the pyrefly-marble eyes and suddenly turned into a waterwheel that did not leak. And though she could not feel the rain pitter-patter on her cheeks, she felt it just by staring into the wildness of his blue eyes.
"And though their love was strong enough, pure enough, to conquer sin - in the end, Lord Zaon died."
"And so did he."
"And so did she."
"And so did I."
"I know."
"And so did you."
"I know, but you're here now."
"I'm here now."
"And you are mine."
"You are mine."
"Mine."
"Mine."
"Mine."