"Now you're going to say something opaque and oracular about the bond between us, aren't you?" – Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

I hate him. He needs to die.

Of course, as soon as I thought that, I burst out laughing. I'm sorry but how can you NOT?

I mean come on. Backtrack, fellas. We've got: evil genius/scientist, secret underground lair, minions, plots of destruction, and quite possibly mental instability.

I can't help but laugh – it's a lifeline. It quickly morphs into a desperate thing, devoid of actual humor, trying in vain to fill the vast emptiness around me.

"Only you could find humor in this."

I freeze. The voice seems to come from nowhere.

"Where are you?"

"Don't worry." He laughs. "I'll come get you."

I'll come get you. Oh, please hurry. I've needed to see you for so long. Speed of light would be good.

There's no flourish, no puff or plume of smoke or ominous wind, he's just not there and then he is. No popping sounds or anything. It wasn't like he appeared out of nowhere, either – it's just he was all-of-a-sudden there, kneeling in a corner and smiling at me.

"How bout we go back to my place? More spacious." He winks.

"How are you so calm about this?"

Glen pauses, smiles at me, eyes glittering. He's too far away. I don't like you so far away.

As if able to read my thoughts (I don't know, maybe he can), he rises to come sit next to me.

"We're in no danger. We may not be able to get out, but if he's not going to kill you then we needn't worry in the least."

"But…he's going to…"

"Kill me? Hardly. I do know that it's all a trick, after all."

"But neither of us will ever get out."

He snorts. "Or, perhaps I've learned a few tricks of my own over the years."

A wave of blue emotion washes over my body. Fatigue, hopelessness, helplessness, giving up, being taken care of. That's what my physical self wants.

"Things weren't supposed to happen like this." I whisper, leaning my head on his shoulder.

Gently, taking advantage of my weak state, he pulls me into his lap – something I never normally do. He tightens his arms around my body.

"No, Cora. It wasn't. But you have to learn to deal with what you have. And right now, this very moment, it is the last night we may be able to be close for a long while." He nuzzles my cheek. I don't note whether or not he is, at the moment, more human or tree. I just know that he feels nice, and right, underneath me now.

I want to ask why. I think about saying something clever or witty. About saying something ridiculously clichéd and hopelessly romantic. I don't know.

But the moment for saying something passes, and a long and comfortable silence stretches between us. That's one of the (many) things I love about him, I guess – though I've never thought about it in those terms before. That he knows when I want to joke around and when I want to not say anything.

So he doesn't say anything when I start to cry, no words of comfort or questions why. Maybe you learn the value of silence as a tree. I sob quietly and he just tightens around me and pulls my head to his chest like I'm a hopeless wallflower waiting to be rescued by some dashing prince.

"He was…" I take a heaving breath. "We were introduced. And…he was so nice. And…and…" I blubber, trying so hard, so hard, not to think about why I loved him. It wasn't love, not really. I told myself it was because I wanted to believe it. Love isn't telling someone that you love them.

It's holding someone when they cry over the bastard that's trying to kill you both.

"I'm sorry," I mutter into his collarbone, trembling with the aftershocks of my breakdown. It's not weak to cry into someone's shoulder. It's not.

It's very hard to convince myself of this.

"I know you are. Emotions are difficult things to control."

He rocks me back and forth gently, in an effort to get me to feel better. I don't know how, but it seems like all of a sudden we're in the other room – the one I saw through the window with the cot. The walls in here are more of a pale, earthly yellow, much more comforting than asylum white.

"I thought you might like it better in here. I'd offer to switch, but I doubt he's thick enough not to notice. Don't want to give away our advantage." He chuckles softly, playing his fingers over my hair.

All cried out now, my eyes sting. Lack of moisture, almost. Have you ever stayed up extremely late, and felt your eyeballs grow dry, felt the need to close your eyes just to stop it? That's my feeling now.

I guess I haven't really been able to sleep at all for the last few days.

I close my eyes.

"You are tired?"

I nod without lifting my eyelids. "I haven't really…slept since you…"

He stops my words, finding my mouth with his own softly.

"You should sleep." He whispers, his warm breath bringing me halfway there.

"But-" he cuts me off, lifting me up and carrying me over to the barebones bed. Well, it's not exactly ideal, but it's far better than nothing.

He lays me down on it, getting on right behind me, pulling me to his chest.

"Sleep, Coralline." He presses a kiss to my ear, my temple, my forehead.

"Be still and know that I love you."

XXX

I didn't want to sleep. I mean if I fell asleep I might wake up and he'd be gone and that would suck massively.

It was a dreamless, heavy, green sleep during which I was acutely aware that he never left my side. It feels so much more desperate, now. Like I'm trying to absorb as much of him as I still can.

But nevertheless I wake up just two hours later, somehow closer to him.

"Sh, sh, Cora. I'm still here." He chuckles. "You can stop burrowing into me."

"Sorry." I whisper, though I'm not really. I've turned around in his grasp, tucked my head under his, all while I was asleep.

He sighs, or at least I feel him sigh by the movement of his chest, running his fingers through my hair. Little pricks and tingles on my scalp lull me into a false happiness.

"He's still gone." I whisper.

"He is."

I place a little kiss on his jaw. "He won't be gone when I wake up again, will he?"

"No, oddling. I doubt it." He sighs.

With a groan, I pull myself from his grasp, my bare feet slapping the tiled floor as I pace the room. It's very quiet here. Very…cut off. I hate it. I like being surrounded but still…open, if that makes any sense at all. Like being in a forest.

Folding my hands behind my back like a stern general, I reach the end of the wall and spin on my heel slowly, thoughtfully, leaning back against it to stare at him.

Perched carefully on the cot, one knee folded up supporting his chin, the other leg folded neatly under that one, flat. Hands laced in front of his shin. He's giving me this amused, twinkling little expression, as if my antics entertain him.

"We have to figure something out. Some way of…of…" I sigh.

"You realize what we must do, Cora. What it is our obligation to do."

I nod, biting my lower lip and sucking on it thoughtfully. I know what we have to do.

We have to kill him.

"How?"

He shakes his head. "That is what I am unsure of. I would prefer to find a way out of this place first, assure myself that you are safe. You are no less human than he is." I rub the bridge of my nose, taking my glasses – which have miraculously survived – out of my pack pocket and slipping them on.

I look back up at him, and he's grinning.

"What?"

"Nothing…"

"What?" I whine.

"You look…different from when I first met you, when you wear glasses. It is strange."

I chuckle. "You remember that?"

"I remember."

I remember too. How cold and distant and unwilling he was to get within three feet of me. And the first time I saw him, too, at the hospital.

XXX

"HELP!" I screeched, running at a speed that'd impress and Olympic sprinter down to the beach.

"Someone! He's drowning!" I saw a body, a vaguely human-shaped body, floating like driftwood in the waves.

I pulled him, by the arm, up onto the damp sand. It seemed as though all of the blood had drained from his face, the life had seeped out of him in equilibrium with the ocean.

Desperately, I grabbed my sweatshirt – I don't know what strange instinct told me to dry him off instead of attempt CPR, but I did anyway – and started to towel him off.

He seemed vaguely familiar, not in the sense of an intimate friend from years ago but in the sense of someone you'd seen just last week in a parking garage, whose name you didn't know but who you smiled and waved at anyway just to be friendly.

He wore only black pants of an unknown cloth, and his bare chest was annoyingly muscular.

"Wake up," I pleaded, drying him off. I didn't know what I would do with myself if this stranger had died on my hands.

"Wake up."

His eyes flew open just then, not nearly long enough for dramatic pressure to build, and stared at me strangely. Almost…in shock.

"Oh, gosh! Are you alright? Do you need me to call an ambulance?"

"No."

That was all that he said to me before disappearing into the forest.

XXX

"You made a funny face at me and ran away." I accuse, poking my tongue out at him.

"I recognized you. But I did not recognize the feeling I had when I recognized you. At the moment, my trained instinct convinced me that unwarranted feelings were best avoided."

I laugh a little bit. "You really are kind of pitiful."

"Resistant to change, please." He says, faux-huffily.

I shake my head and start pacing again. Step, step, step, cot/Glen, wall, step, cot/Glen, step, step, step, wall, step, step, step. It's not a large room.

The next time I pass by the cot, however, Glen grabs my arm and pulls me down to sit next to him. A bit forcefully, though, my sore body protesting.

I wince, soliciting an immediate apologetic reaction from him.

"I – I did not mean to –"

"Relax, Glen. I know. It must be like handling glass." He nods sadly, never breaking eye contact.

A sly smile settles itself on his lips.

"This doesn't feel like glass. It feels warm. And smooth." I can't contain a tiny gasp as every muscle in my abdomen tenses, his hand roaming its way across my stomach.

"Uh,"

"That's what I thought." He laughs, pulling his hand away and leaning in closer.

"That tickled."

"I know. You're very ticklish."

"Please don't remind me." I giggle a little bit.

"May we please plot here instead of having you pace like a restless tiger?"

I pout. "Fine."

He closes his eyes, and for once I do note that he is bark-covered and peaceful, resting his forehead against my shoulder.

We say nothing for a little while.

I see him play with his fingers, tapping his thumb against each one. I watch something grow there, on his palm. Something not quite possible, but there nevertheless.

He opens his hand, and I see what he was – making, I suppose? It's beautiful. A flower, like a tiny little snapdragon flower, pale yellow in color. Its stem is contorted and twisted, wrapped around itself in a circle.

"Here," he says quietly, slipping it onto my forefinger. "I hope you don't mind. I know you dislike jewelry."

"What's it for?" I breath, staring at it. I was wrong – it's not like a snapdragon, it is one. A tiny one, but a living one, somehow still growing, right there on my finger.

"It is a promise." He tells me simply.

"Of…?"

"That you will wait for me. No matter what he will make you think. That you will wait for me if something happens because I will not die and neither will you, and I know that."

"Of course." I say, surprised that he'd think he needed me to say it out loud.

"You won't have to wait long, of course. But should the need arise, I may need to be gone for a few days."

"Mmhm." I nod.

He grins uncontrollably, like I just promised him the world.

"I suppose it is a promise of something else as well."

"And that would be?"

He closes the distance between us, pulling my face to his as I do likewise, reveling in the feel of his lips on mine.

"Of that." He whispers. "Now, we need to figure a few things out."

XXX

So when morning comes I'm not exactly skipping cheerful, but I'm less than morose. I've got my glasses and my braid and my snapdragon ring and a hopeful promise from the man – creature – on the other side of the glass window. And a plan. Sort of.

It barely waivers when Max opens the door and comes in, smiling at me sheepishly, jangling keys in his pocket.

"Hey, mermaid."

"Fuck off." I say brightly.

"Oh, sweetie. He's still got you tricked. You'll realize I'm right eventually." He sighs, making as if the move closer.

"I refer you to my previous statement." I tell him coldly, scooting further into the corner.

He shrugs. "Just thought you might want to know. Curious mind of a scientist, you know."

"Eat socks."

He frowns. It still hurts a little bit, inside me, right along my scar. It's a newly reopened wound in some senses. "Anyways. Seems like dryads have a form of…protection that automatically applies to their victims. Makes them immune to some things – such as a paralytic venom that might convince him you'd died." He sighs.

Oh, so I'm a 'victim' now? I want to ask him this, but I've decided I won't dignify him with recognition of his evil.

"Of course, you're far from his level of immortal. So I thought: what's a supernatural way around a supernatural shield?"

"You know, I bet you and Hitler would have a lot to talk about."

He continues rambling, ignoring me. "Then of course, it hit me! I doubt this'll kill you, but it's damn close. I hope it doesn't hurt though. Don't want you scarred, Cor. Love you. Bye."

Did he actually just say that? Lousy bastard.

As he's leaving, I hear clanks and forceful pushing. And that's when the person gets forced into my cell.

My cell with the asylum white walls.

The last person I could have expected to see in this room. With pale yellow hair, sharp features and rapidly darkening eyes.

"Jasper?"

A/N: HAHA! Hahaaha. Cliffhanger. See how you deal with that mess.

-shies away embarrassed because no one actually cares-

Sorries. I had a little too much free time today. Also, apologies for not updating yesterday, but I was – oh, hell, who am I kidding, no one cares about my personal life. I don't care about my personal life. Erhem. Going back to my corner now. (does suspicious things in a corner)

Leave a review if you pity me!