Lily sleeps without dreams until awareness comes to her slowly, heavily, like floating in deep water. Around her is a blackness so complete that she feels it in her bones, cold and still, and she perceives nothing but her own body drifting in the great sea of it.
My heart, my soul, my love… The whispers curl around her in tendrils, caressing her fingers, her lips, her knees, creeping up her spine.
Love? She questions, as she did before, and wonders that a heart so shadowed could know love at all.
All things love that feel, Lady.
Love is of light, Lily thinks, insistent.
It is born of darkness, he returns. The light is full of greed, and covets all things sweet. Lily puzzles at that and thinks of how the darkness had wished to consume the world.
She feels his laughter, cold with resentment. It rumbles in her chest and between her toes, and she understands for just a moment the emptiness of eternity. First there was the void, he tells her, and the void needed nothing. The light disturbed it, and suffering was born into existence. Her heart clenches at his words and she thinks to tell him that she does not understand, to ask him to explain his meaning, but too soon she is being pulled away from him like a current pulling her back to shore.
Lily woke gently, turning into her pillow as the first rays of dawn fell across her face from the open window. The soft breeze that made the trees whisper outside swept a cool wave over the nape of her neck, tickling the fine hairs there and making her sigh lightly. She raised her head, squinting her eyes in the sunlight and breathing deeply the freshness of the air.
She rose as she did every day, allowing her maids to dress and dote upon her before finding her father to kiss his cheeks and squeeze his hands before slipping into the gardens. The strange dreams invaded her thoughts as she walked, dodging courtiers and scampering through back gates to find her escape from the palace grounds. Every night they'd come, every night since she'd had to descend into the realm beneath the great tree and put the world to rights after her mistake had thrown it into death and ice.
Lily sat on the forest floor, fluttering her fingers on the leaves around her. She had not called for Jack, but she knew that she did not need to. She saw the creatures of the wood notice her and greeted them as best as he had taught her, and they passed her words along until a finch landed on his knee.
She needed him today, needed to lie in his arms and feel his soft kisses on her eyelids. She'd been so restless, her mind ever turning towards questions of the soul that she did not know how to ask. She had been since that terrible day so many months ago.
A few minutes later the brush shook noisily and Jack emerged, slightly out of breath. His eyes lit up as he laid them on her, and Lily gave him her brightest smile and stretched her arms in invitation. Her fingers wriggled as he jogged towards her, landing on his knees and softly pushing her back into the tall grasses until he rested on her with their noses a hair's breadth apart.
"Hello Lily," he said quietly, briefly tapping his nose against hers.
"Hello Jack," she responded, still smiling. She looked into his kind eyes, picking out all of their colors, though she knew the exact patterns of them well. Sweet Jack, she thought, I could lie in your arms forever and never have a care as long as I live. She could, she could.
Lily kissed him softly, on his nose and then on his ever so slightly opened mouth. As she pulled back his eyes were still closed, upturned lips still parted. As Jack's eyes opened dreamily, he took a deep breath through his nose, smelling the sweet scent of her skin and the foliage around their heads. He kissed her once more, lingering longer, bringing a hand up to rest at her jaw and stroke his thumb against her cheek.
A sigh passed her lips as he finally pulled away and they laid like that for a long time, staring at each other and passing gentle touches and kisses between them. He brought her berries and small, tart apples when he felt the slight rumble of her empty belly against his, and when a hare approached them cautiously he coaxed it over and she stroked its silky head before it darted back through the trees. Her laughter brought his eyes from the hare back to her face and he smiled.
When the sun had nearly touched the horizon and the barest hints of pink and orange streaked the sky, he knew that she would have to leave him soon. Lily had laid her head in his lap as he sat with his back propped against a tree. Jack was stroking her hair tenderly, and she felt her mind wander to a question that had plagued her all day. "Jack?" she asked him, "What do you think love is?"
"Love?" he grinned down at her, then looked away as he tried to find his answer. Words never came to him easily. "Love is… this," he finished, swooping down and lifting her head to kiss her lips and then flutter his eyelashes on her face until she gave a giddy laugh.
Yes, Lily thought as she felt that familiar joy in her heart, yes it is.
And yet, something inside of her ached.
Lily dreams again, and this time she sees his face. She feels the suggestion of his fingers as they brush her cheek, a soft touch so full of longing that for a moment she follows it. They are still in the sea of nothingness, ebbing and flowing in serenity. He tells her of despair, of rage and of struggle. Struggle, he says, fought against invasion and persecution. He tells her that her world is a battleground.
"The void birthed Darkness in desperation to keep the light at bay," he says, "and Darkness was sculpted from the sorrow and the wrath that were the void's only possessions, gifted by the new sun."
"And what of love?" She asks.
"Peace," he responds. "Love is respite, stillness in the maelstrom. It is shelter from strife, from the pain of loneliness. To know love truly, one must know the need of it."
"And I bring you stillness? I ease your pain?"
"You do, Lady," he says simply.
The next time Lilly left to find Jack she was pensive. She sought him out of a desire for comfort, for the sense of calm and wellbeing he always brought her, the joy he sparked with his kisses.
She'd always needed him this way, she realized. Lily had found Jack just after her mother died, when she'd lost her sense of joy almost entirely. He lifted her spirits so deftly and she'd fallen instantly, madly in love with him. She'd needed him then, just as she needed him today.
Lily's gait slowed as she thought to herself, wondering if Jack needed her in the same way. She considered that she did not know where he came from. She'd come close to approaching the question but had never brought herself to ask him outright, and he had never told her on his own. Many times Lily wondered if some tragedy had befallen him early in his life. Where were his parents? He'd always spoken so simply, so childishly, and upon their first meeting he had sounded as though he was struggling to remember how to speak in his slow, stilted human language. Despite that, she'd never sensed in him the anguish that she felt and so had kept her own hidden away. She came to Jack for lightness and escape from the pain in her heart, and so left that piece of herself behind to join him in this forested dreamland.
Lily sighed deeply and started humming quietly, then a little louder. Singing always brought him to her as her voice echoed sweetly between the trees and the birds picked up the familiar melody, carrying it further. She hummed louder still, as clearly as she could. She couldn't bring herself to sing today. The sense of malaise that would not leave her had grown sharp and bitter in the past days and the pretty words stuck in her throat when she tried.
Luckily, the birds had caught the tune with gusto, as if sensing her need of their supportive chorus. By the time Jack reached her she was leaning against a tree, listening quietly to their twittering, soaring voices.
He approached her slowly, cautiously, as he had never done before. She jumped when his fingers brushed her cheek, though she had seen him raise his hand. Jack winced and frowned when she did, pulling away a few inches. "Why are you crying, Lily?"
"I...' Lily faltered, wiping at her own cheek, staring at her wet fingertips. "I'm sorry, Jack," she said, wrapping her arms around him. He embraced her immediately, undemanding, resting his lips in her hair. He didn't ask what she was sorry for, only held her as she clung to him, breath quiet at first and then hitching into sobs that she didn't understand in the least. She was glad he didn't ask, because she scarcely knew herself.
When she finally stilled, Jack kissed away the last of her tears and coaxed a smile from her. He led her into a glade full of dragonflies and made a flower crown for her hair, and no more mention was made of what had passed.
Darkness speaks to her again of love and other things as she rests in a bed of shadows that cradle and rock her as though she were weightless.
She asks for his name, but he has nothing to offer. Though there are many words by which he is described, none are true in the way she suggests and none were given by his creator. She addresses him simply as milord instead, and he is pleased that she addresses him at all.
He tells her stories, such stories! Stories of the great above and the great below and of the places between and around which she can scarcely conceive, grand tales of woe and victory and passion. Night after night he tells her tales both witnessed and lived. He tells her tales that he was told, though he has lived long and his own past is rich enough with lore to keep her curious nature fascinated. He is also, she admits to herself, charming in his way. Simple conversation, he had beseeched. She did not expect to enjoy it so much.
He asks for her stories in return. He hears her guilt over the unicorns without judgement, though it was an injury to him in the end, though she betrayed him. I value your thoughts, he once said, and now he says so by seeking her self, all of the pieces of her. He claws away at the pain in her chest until she gives it to him, until she rages at him for his insolence and the tears come. Then, when Lily has let her rage pass and feels her sorrows ease with such relief that she nearly weeps anew, his hot tongue is what collects the tears from her cheeks. She allows him to lap at her face, not knowing why. It's oddly soothing, if an entirely strange gesture, and she finds that here in her dream she does not mind his closeness so much. She is even sitting in his lap, she realizes, though she knows not how she got here and cannot remember seeing him so clearly, so solidly before. He has always been insubstantial.
There is a moment in which she feels the wild urge to turn within his grasp and lick him back, feel the skin stretched taught over his oddly, grotesquely beautiful cheekbone with her tongue. As it is she cannot, or perhaps does not resist when her small hands snake up the rounded, powerful muscles in his arms and stop to splay over his exposed chest. Real, she thinks, he feels so real. So real that she is caught, unable to tear her hands away from his skin as she knows… feels… supposes that she should want to do. Only a dream…
Suddenly panic consumes her. This does not make sense, and yet it does. He is master of dreams, he has told her himself. Her dream-thoughts are muzzy, slow, and she knows this is wrong but cannot say why because at this moment what she feels is the heat of him and the struggle of what she has always been taught of goodness and somewhere in the back of her mind is Jack…
Lily is pulled awake by her turmoil, both anguished at being ripped from his embrace and frantic to get away. His face fades from her vision, full of want and loneliness and hope, and in the morning she can think of nothing but the look in his eyes as she edged to wakefulness and he whispered a soft, "Please, Lady…"
A/N: Since posting this I've edited it and completed four sequels (two oneshots, one two-shot and a multi-chapter) as well as started writing a fifth, which is also multi-chapter. All of this has been taking place over on Ao3, because I like it better, and honestly it's all a bit... explicit for ffn.
The sequel titles are: Interlude, Lilith Rising, Shadow Dance, Black as Midnight, Black as Pitch and Mother of Demons, posted currently on Ao3, username MahnaMahna.