Break
Prompted by Athena, for whom one of these days I may write a fill that's not depressing. (That's a lie.)
"You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me."
She glitters in the candlelight – jewels winking at throat and ears and breast and fingers, all still softer than the diamond hardness of her eyes – but he knows her no matter what and knows that she is brittle, flawed, may crack at the right (wrong) touch. And oh, he wants to press, wants to see what happens when this façade shatters, because he may know her but even he can only guess as to what lies beneath her mask now.
"You don't know how to love," he shoots back, though, because she's cut him and burned him and bled him, left the heart that yearns for her even now on the floor – because she's nearly killed him more than once, in a thousand small ways, by inches since she returned, and because he wants to hurt her just as much, just as it seems he always does.
One hand, lily white despite all the blood he knows has stained it, lifts towards her throat, falls uselessly back to her side before she squares her shoulders. "I did," she says, and his heart is shattering under her heel as she spins away, and hers is tearing in the hands he clenches at his sides, "once."