38. Dagon
Chapter thirty-eight
Dagon
The lines between dreams and reality blurred. I was in this semiconscious space where I knew I was dreaming but wasn’t fully awake either.
Orbs of fire ignited around me. Di was on the other side, but I couldn’t reach him. I opened my mouth, screaming his name soundlessly. Hell was holding me away from the person I loved, and I was burning in these fires.
Mine, something in the fire whispered. Not Di's voice.
Mine. Mine. Mine. And I understood, in the way you understand things in dreams, that the fire was not punishing me.
The fire was claiming me. And Di was on the other side because he was being kept from me.
Or I was being kept from him. I couldn't tell which.
Suddenly, I felt fingertips softly tracing over my chest, pulling me gently from the nightmare. There was a whisper in the distance.
“Love, it’s okay. You’re okay.” It was Di’s voice.
The fire from my dreams dispersed, and I tried to open my eyes. It happened slowly, much slower than I wanted it to. I needed to see if Diablos was safe. I needed to touch him and assure myself that Hell didn’t tear us apart.
I blinked and tried to focus. Everything seemed blurry and distorted. The harsh light streaming through the window blurred my vision even more.
The bed dipped, and I felt a heavy weight over my body. Contrary to the dream I had where it was scorching hot, I felt my skin prickling with cold shivers. Why was I so cold?
Starborns weren't cold. Starborns ran hot, that was the whole point of being one.
Fire moved through us the way blood moved through humans.
The fact that I was shivering – that I was registering Di's body as warm instead of cool against my heat – that wasn't grogginess.
That was wrong. Something the white-haired Starborn had left in me was still in there.
Still draining whatever made me like this.
I filed the fear under later. Di first.
“I was so afraid. I thought I lost you,” Di sobbed softly into my neck.
His words were like cold water poured over my mind. The fog rose, all the memories from yesterday came rushing, and so did the fear. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed his forehead.
I pulled back to look at him properly, and the breath left my chest in a way that had nothing to do with the wound in my back.
Diablos.
His eyes were rimmed red. Not from fresh tears, from hours of them.
The skin underneath was swollen and bruised-looking, the way it gets when you've been crying so long the tears stop being water and start being something that hurts you on the way out.
His hair was a disaster. Not bed-mussed.
Pulled at. The strands at his temples were stuck together where his fingers had been gripping them.
His lips were chapped. His hands, when I caught one of them, were shaking.
Not from cold. From whatever shaking comes after hours of shaking.
I knew this face. I had memorized this body for eight years and I knew what this version of him meant.
He had spiraled all night.
He had spiraled all night alone. While I slept three feet away from him and couldn't help him.
My chest split open in a new way. A way the white-haired Starborn hadn't reached.
"Di," I said quietly… "what did the night do to you?"
He flinched. He opened his mouth to answer me, and I watched him decide, in real time, how much. He decided on less.
"I'm okay now," he said. "You're awake. I'm okay now."
That wasn't an answer. That was a patch over an answer. The version of an answer he could survive saying out loud. I knew the difference. I had given the same kind of half-answer to Andras a hundred times.
I didn't push.
Some things don't get said in the first ten minutes after waking up. Some things take longer. He would tell me what he could when he could. My job was to not make him do it twice.
Instead, I lifted his shaking hand and pressed my mouth to the inside of his wrist. I see you, I tried to say with my lips against his skin. I see what last night did to you. I'm here now. Whatever it cost, you don't have to carry it alone anymore.
His other hand, the one I hadn't kissed yet, came up to my hair. And then I saw it.
The bow and arrow.
Black ink running across wrist like a vein someone had drawn in with a fine brush. I caught the hand. Brought it closer and looked.
It was the shape of the arrow he had held in the field. Stripped to its outline and burned into him.
"Di," I whispered, "what happened to you?"
He looked down at our joined hands. At the mark. His throat worked.
"I'll explain everything," he said. "I will. Just, let me hold you for one more minute first. Please."
I held him.
One minute. Five. Ten. However many he needed.
Gently, I cupped the back of his neck and drew him into a slow, deliberate kiss.
This was as much a kiss to reassure us that we were alive as it was to help Di breathe.
I matched every one of my breaths with slow, deep ones.
Inhaling when he exhaled and exhaling when he was inhaling.
Gradually, our breathing aligned, calming us both.
When we finally separated, he studied me anxiously. “Are you in pain? How are you feeling?”
Stroking his back, I answered, “For some reason, I still feel a bit cold and dizzy, but I’ll be fine.”
He immediately jumped up. Before I could protest, he threw over me a thick blanket and returned to bed. Reaching the nightstand, he grabbed a glass of water and said, “Here, drink this. It may help with the headache, or I can go prepare some tea?”
“All I need is you. Give me half an hour, and I’ll be back to normal.” I drank the water and then snuggled with him, “Tell me everything.”
I needed to know what happened.
Di confessed that he had hidden from me his conversation with King, detailing Lucifer's involvement in creating the objects and forcing him to choose between darkness and light. To say I was shocked and horrified would be putting it mildly. Then he dropped the bombshell that he met Lucifer.
“What!?” I screamed.
“Calm down. It was okay.”
“Lucifer was okay?” I asked flabbergasted.
“I’m getting a déjà vu. It wasn’t long ago when you said the same,” he retorted.
“That was different.”
“Yeah,” he patted my chest.
He proceeded to replay his conversation with Lucifer.
I was shocked when I heard I was meant to serve in Lucifer’s inner circle.
Why did he let me go? He could have easily tracked me down and brought me back to Hell.
I left aside this question without an answer when Di told me what Lucifer made him do.
By the second, my blood got hotter and hotter.
He made him kneel? He said his soul belonged to him! ?
“No one! Your soul belongs to no one else besides you… and me!” I gritted through clenched teeth.
"And you…" my throat closed. "You went to him. You texted King. You figured this out alone. You walked into a fucking blood ritual and pledged your soul to the King of Hell, and the only person you told was Lucifer himself. Not me. Not me."
Di went very still.
"Dagon…"
"I don't…" I tried to find the right words.
None of them existed. "I'm not angry at you.
I just, Di, I would have gone with you. I would have stood next to you in front of him.
I would have made the deal with you instead of you alone.
You think I would have let you kneel by yourself?
You think I would have let him put anything over you that he didn't put over me first? "
"I know," Di whispered. "I know, my love. That's exactly why I didn't tell you."
My chest cracked open again.
He saw it. He reached up and cradled my face in both hands, the hand with the arrow against my jaw, the hand without it against my cheek.
"If I'd told you," he said softly "you would have tried to do it instead of me somehow.
You would have offered yourself first. And the bow is connected to me.
Not you. There was no version where you took my place.
There was only the version where you came with me and got hurt trying to stop something neither of us could stop.
I made the choice alone because only I could make it.
Not because I didn't trust you with it. Because I love you too much to let you stand in front of it. "
I closed my eyes.
I couldn't argue with that. I hated that I couldn't argue with that. He was right. He had done the only thing that kept us both alive.
It still hurt. It would keep hurting for a while.
But he was right.
“Calm down. I was thinking about it while I waited for you to wake up. I suspect Lucifer meant it in the same way his demons belong to him. Correct me if I’m wrong, but he sees them as possessions, objects that belong to him?”
I gave myself a second before answering, “Yes. It’s no secret Lucifer can control all of us with a snap of his mood and powers.”
“I think it’s the same. Besides, the object may be bound to me, but it still belongs to Lucifer. His command would overrule mine.”
“The archer?” I remembered the white grandpa saying that.
“It’s what Lucifer called me, or well, it’s what he called the bow and arrow I think, I'm not sure. I have a feeling Lucifer named his objects,” Di chuckled. I wasn’t finding anything funny in the situation. “Dagon, it’s okay. I made my choice.”
“Why? Why did you choose this? You could have easily chosen-” He interrupted me with a kiss.
Everything else faded as his taste surrounded me.
When our lips parted, his gaze was steady and clear. “I knew this was the right choice. Part of the reason was that I would become a demon when we bond. Another part of the reason was that I always felt more comfortable with the darkness. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I lived most of my life.”
“But you had the chance to choose something different.”
“I had, yes, but I made my choice.”
He was silently asking me to respect his choice, respect him, and have faith that he knew what he was doing.
I didn’t want to question him, to undermine his decision.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel I was the reason for all of this.
I couldn’t help but fear what Lucifer may force him to do and how it may change him.
Sensing my turmoil, Di spoke softly. “For most of my life, I was scared of the darkness. But recently I've realized the darkness isn't innately bad. It’s what we do with it that matters. Besides, I have you with me. Together. We’ll stand together.”
“You’ll never again be alone. I’m here, and I’ll always be,“ I promised him.
Staring at my eyes intently, it felt like he was looking into the depths of my soul as he said, “You’re my brightest shining star, Dagon.
As long as I have you, the darkness doesn’t scare me.
As long as I have you, I can be surrounded by a void of nightmares and demons, but you will shine brightly and remind me that there’s light in the darkness. ”
My eyes blurred with emotion, and my soul yearned to give everything to Diablos. To be his light, to be the person who is always beside him and loves him for an eternity.
“You’re already all of that for me,” I whispered. “You’ve always been my everything, my little starlight.”
“I love you,” he croaked.
“I love you, too.”
I kissed him deeply, trying to seal the promises we gave each other. Di was my whole world. He was my sky, the stars, and the moon. He was everything.
I held him for a long time after that. Long after the kiss ended. Long after his breathing slowed back into something steady against my chest.
Outside the window, somewhere in the field where I had fallen and Di had become something we didn't have a name for, the world was getting on with itself.
Demons were still out there. The white-haired one was still out there.
The wound in my back was still throbbing and still cold.
Lucifer had Di's promise of anything in his pocket.
And the black bow and arrow on Di's hand was real. Permanent. Part of him now.
None of it was solved.
But Di's heart was beating against my ribs and my heart was beating against his, we were both alive, both here and both still ourselves, and for one more morning, that was enough.
It had to be enough.
I would make it enough.