A/N: Warning for mentions of death, moral dilemmas and guilt. This was inspired by Halsey's Young God.
If there's a light at the end,
it's just the sun in your eyes.
"What's wrong?" Valtor asked and she could feel his gaze on her. He'd figured out there was a problem, probably by her attempts to hide in the crook of his neck. He didn't like it when she was hiding from him, but that was not what she was doing. She was just hiding from everything.
His fingers were tracing over her shoulder haphazardly as if trying to find out how to unravel her so that he could read what was going on in her mind. It should have scared her, both with the threat it imposed on her wholeness and with the darkness that would surely spill out with his success, but she couldn't be terrified when she was in his arms. She could only be enthralled, with him and his crimes. Their crimes. They were together in that. Just as they were in all things.
"I just…" It would sound ridiculous. It was ridiculous. It wasn't something she should think about. But she had to tell him. He wanted to know and she didn't want to keep thinking, mulling over it on her own if he could provide some comfort. And she knew he could. He always did. He was so good at that. Too good even. Always lulling her concerns and her conscience to sleep so that he could play with the out of control witch. And their games were sacred to the two of them and sinister in their consequences for everyone else. "I feel like there's too much darkness," she said, her lips pressing against his heated skin as if she was trying to burn the thought out of her mind.
Sometimes she thought it was the darkness that drew them together and sometimes she thought it was his flames that had her entranced. The truth was that it didn't matter. She was his either way and her soul felt right whenever she was next to him no matter what stain she'd sullied it with. There were moments, though, when the thoughts pulled her away from him and put enough cold between them to make her question everything. To make her question them.
"Inside me," she said when he took too long to respond. Or maybe it was just the swirl of doubts in her mind that was moving too fast.
She'd been told she was bad, immoral, a criminal. She'd been called a monster. Evil. It hadn't mattered. It still didn't. Yet, there were moments when it hit so hard and left her breathless. They were far enough apart for her to call them a fluke in her system but they still shined through like stars on the night sky that were far, far away from each other but still managed to illuminate the blackness around. Only, those lights she hated. They spoke of things she wished to keep buried, things she should have forgotten when the victims of them were six feet deep under her feet. But they came back to haunt her and Valtor wasn't in her mind to kill them out of there, too, like they'd wiped them off the face of the world. It was a nightmare that had started hand in hand with their romance.
"Griffin," Valtor's voice caressed her ears when he said her name with so much care in it. It had all the noise between them die down and the hassle in her brain calmed a little. A feat she'd thank him for forever. "Look at me." His fingers were under her chin and tilting her head up for their eyes to meet, giving her no choice on the matter but that was fine when she'd always choose him. His blue was so soft, as if the ice would shed tears, small drops of water from its very core. "You shine brighter than my fire," he said and the sincerity in him had her swallowing the words deep inside her belly where she would greedily keep them forever. The thoughts in her mind wouldn't be able to touch them there, and neither would the guilt in her heart. Too bad she couldn't eat their entire love to keep it safe too. "Comparing your eyes to suns wouldn't do them justice," Valtor said and moved his hand to stroke her hair.
She purred at the touch, like a kitten, but she didn't care. She would do whatever he wanted, could do whatever she wanted when she was in his embrace. And most importantly, she could be the light to him like she'd never been to anyone. She'd always been the antipode, the dark counterpart, especially when she stood next to Faragonda, the fairy shining so radiantly in her winx that Griffin could barely see herself, the little shadow in the background that was left.
Perhaps if she hadn't been so blinded by her own ego, by her need to be something other than a dark deed after dark deed, she might have seen that Valtor's Dragon Fire was dark even when it burned bright. And in the face of that, her light wasn't light at all. Just another thread of darkness tangled with his own in a curtain so thick and unyielding it was suffocating the world. Though, maybe it was better she didn't notice. In that moment, when he'd been looking at her like she was the only thing that mattered, she wouldn't have cared. And she should have hated herself for it, but she was too busy loving him to notice what the world demanded from her being.