diamonds from ash

content warnings:
body control, breathplay, thoughts of death

When I found her, she was broken. Shattered, even.

Cracks across every surface, every limb. Almost every joint. She could hardly move without a terrible grinding and screeching issuing forth, like nails upon a chalkboard; yet as painful as the sound was, the sensation was surely far, far worse. It must have been, for she moved very little, even when she should have. Even when she wanted to; when I wanted her to. Only very occasionally, and always with the noise of a brutally neglected machine-thing.

She must have been loved at some point, by someone. How else would she have made it in such a state for so long, dragging herself through existence? But there was no trace of that someone now. Only her; only me.

It wasn’t out of pity that I did what I did. Honestly, I still don’t know what prompted me to do it at the time.

I still remember the surprise on her face when I took her arm and started injecting my sunlight. The liquid gold, running through her empty space, bubbling to the surface and filling in the cracks. Her fingers, her wrist; forearm, elbow, upper arm, all the way to her shoulder. Every bit of it shot through, no longer with dark fractures, but luminous golden tracery.

She looked at her arm, and she looked at me, utterly bewildered. As if she couldn’t imagine why I would do such a thing. But when I took control of her arm, and her own hand rose to her neck and wrapped around her throat, and began to squeeze – so very little pressure it would take, as weak and fractured as she already was-

All she did was smile, and close her eyes, and mouth a silent ‘thank you’.

And I stopped.

Her arm, the golden one, lowered. “why did you stop?” she asked, confused. As was I, this not being the question I expected.

“Why did you… thank me? When I was about to…” I couldn’t even finish.

“because,” she replied gently, in the smallest and softest voice I’d ever heard, “you gave me beauty, my very first taste of it. how could i ever be ungrateful to you, even in death?”

I filled in the rest of her cracks after that, my sunlight slowly pouring in through pinprick wounds. Her other arm, her legs, her chest. Everything up to her neck.

She stared at me, one large fracture still running through her forehead and down one cheek, and other smaller ones besides. “will you not finish the job you began?”

“You would become someone different, I think, if I filled you up the rest of the way,” I said, hesitantly. “Someone who is… not exactly you.”

Her face didn’t change, but subtly, I could tell she was disappointed with the answer. “is that such a bad thing?”

“I think so, yes.”

“would it still be a bad thing if i wished for it with all my heart?”

I couldn’t give her an answer in the end. Was I the weaker one, after all?