A/N: Um. This is not the dragon story.

I've shamefully borrowed the title from one of my favorite books by C.S. Lewis - an allegorical retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. My story has nothing to do with Lewis's masterpiece, but the title so haunted me that I promised myself I'd someday try to write about the deep parts of ourselves that we hide unaware behind our faces, even as we struggle to discover - and accept - who we really are.

This, sadly, is not that story, either - it would've been far too devastating.

However, this instead is a tale of loss and grief, errant choices, the different ways people can love and - binding everything catastrophically together - time. I thought it'd be a nice change from the usual shinyfluffy stuff I've been writing. I hope you like it.

Under a sky that hangs in shades of pewter and graphite - ashen tiers like the dusty swag valances over an empty stage - the house sits.

Inside the house that - for completely different reasons - is no longer their home, the two women embrace.

"Mom," says the one, "I can stay, you know. Are you sure -?"

"I'll be fine," the other interrupts, and her voice is gentle but firm, "you've got the kids home with you for the weekend, and they'll want you there; Sam, too. We'll talk on the phone soon. I'll be okay, honey - really."

Reluctantly, the first woman pulls away and sighs in exasperation. "I worry about you, Mom."

A laugh: genuine surprise. "You worry about me?" Look at me! I'll be fine. I'm the one worried about you."

It's a game they play often, these two - each the spitting image of the other, they could have been sisters but for the decades between them. Even now, with the weight of the day on their minds, they exchange smiles. It is an incongruous gesture, and one they welcome amidst the heavier emotion in the air.

"It was a lovely service," the first says. "The minister - did he know?"

The second nods. "One of my oldest friends; he's always known. And yes, Aunt Daphne did a wonderful job, didn't she? She's always had a knack for this sort of thing - weddings, usually, but . . . funerals, too."

"Not that there're many of those on your side of the family."

"No, I suppose not." In the pause that follows, she says again, meaningfully, "I'm really okay."

The first woman leans in with a kiss on the cheek. "Alright, Mom. Call if you need anything. Anything."

Her mother nods, and watches silently even after the car's pulled out of the driveway and the pewter sky's deepened into velvet and diamonds. She feels small under all that light, but not alone - she's always loved the stars, the feeling of being connected to other worlds, bigger pictures, older times.

But even those bathed in the glory of the galaxies must return to the earth that is their home, and the old house - with all its memories - beckons her.

Sabrina Grimm steps over the threshold and shuts the door.

How does one continue living in a place that is both devastatingly changed and yet exactly the same?

Everywhere her gaze falls - even if she hadn't been deliberately looking - is a testimony to his life. The dent in the armchair that held his solidness before the illness robbed him of it. The books in the bookcase with pages his thumbs had worn soft and which his eyes had loved even more. The mug next to the kitchen sink, that she hadn't washed because it was the last thing touched by his lips. The myriad of facial expressions and gestures in the photographs over the fireplace, on the wall behind the sofa, along the stairwell, in the albums in the drawers, on her phone.

The ring on her finger.

The vows in her heart.

He's still real. And a funeral - no matter how lovely - cannot unmake a life once lived.

Any minute now, he'll walk through the door, declaring himself home, catching her around the waist, his lips on hers, warm, alive.

Bradley Scott, 87, beloved husband and loving father, left behind a wife of sixty-one years, one daughter, one grandson, one granddaughter, five great-grandchildren.

This is a house full of evidence that he is still there, moving between the furniture, owning every atom of every possession in every room. It isn't home without him in it, and yet it must continue to be.

These are her thoughts as she climbs the staircase to the upper storey, pausing at the door to their bedroom. She should change the linens, she tells herself. She hasn't slept in the bed since he'd lain there with the tubes and bags filled with fluids going in and out of him, where he'd taken his last labored breath. And while death isn't contagious, there is a taboo in lying on sheets where someone had lost that kind of battle. Or maybe it's the sickly-sweet smell that lingers as people pass ungraciously from this life to the next - the somatic send-off that is dramatic only in its guarantee of no return.

The sheets can wait till tomorrow - or next week, she decides as she slides into the bed; tonight, she'll still have him with her. She isn't afraid of what he might've left - it's all him in the fibers of the fabric, anyway, and heaven knows she's content to have even that for a little while more. But she won't press her face to his pillow, though - she tells herself it doesn't truly smell like him; not anymore, not with all the medicines and chemicals and drugs he'd worn like a cheap cologne in those last few weeks. But there's another reason: some part of her doesn't want to breathe him in and find that he's still there, somewhere in the midst of the imposter smells. It'll be too real then, because when she exhales, she'll have lost him all over again.

So she closes her eyes and prays - for his soul and for her eternity with only the echoes left of it.

Something in the room changes. It isn't ghosts, although the thought does cross her mind. She had, after all, been bartering with them for as long as Bradley had hung suspended between life and death: sleep for time, dreams for peace, earth for heaven.

The skin on the back of her neck prickles. Instinctively, she looks at the shaft of light slanting in through the window in an oblique splay on the floor.

Nothing.

But in the deep pools outside of the window-light, a shadow moves.

In a normal circumstance, she might have asked, "Who is it?" But this feels familiar. Kindred but bygone.

A ghost after all.

And so, from the raggedness of her heart, she exhales instead, "Is it you?"

"Yes."

She nods, satisfied. It doesn't surprise her that her eyes, so recently spent, are once again wet - his timing had always been cruel.

"I came to see how you are."

She doesn't hear the words, just the voice that'd spoken them. She tries to count the years in it, and can't. She settles for moods instead.

"He's gone." She says unnecessarily; she suspects he already knew.

"It was a nice funeral. And you?"

Kindness.

"I'll live."

Too late she realizes the humor she hadn't meant. He laughs - a chilling sound. And callousness.

"It's what we do, isn't it?" He remarks, and some of the cold is thawed by the remnant of his mirth. "Live?"

"What do you want?" She asks, finally tiring of pleasantries. It's been decades since she'd last heard from him, of him; his appearance now - at this particular moment in their eternity - can hardly be happenstance.

There's a pause during which she can hear him breathe, can feel how alive he is. It makes her angry, so angry, but anger is part of grief, and grief is loss acting out, so she doesn't feel it amiss.

"We've come full circle." A cryptic answer, and she's about to add to her list of his moods also: tiresome when he continues, "I forgot, again, why it took this long. And then I remembered the mortal lifespan can be . . . considerable. What will you do now?"

She blinks back the tears that've blurred the features of the room around her. What, indeed? There are legal matters to see to, insurance claims to file, the remainder of the medical bills to pay. And - when she can bring herself to do it - organize Bradley's things: clothes, books, music, the collections of bottles and foreign coins, the knickknacks of a man who'd once been young and enthusiastic about the future - his own specifically, as well as in the general sense.

She doesn't think the question is about that, however.

She also doesn't think he's come all this way, after all this time, to merely offer his condolences.

"Come into the light," she asks him. Your voice betrays nothing of what time has done with you; maybe my eyes can tell me instead.

"I. . . I don't think that's a good idea." There's an unexpected gentleness in his tone and she realizes, with sudden dread, that he's trying to protect her.

Why?

"Please," she begs him, and feels grief anew in an inexplicable surge that splinters into shackles around her memories, each as discrete as the images and sensations that suddenly come, unbidden, to her.

There is a rustle of fabric - his garments - and a figure moves out of the darkness and into the window-light. A cool gust of wind momentarily disturbs the curtains, and she's grateful for the distraction afforded her eyes before they return to him.

They return to him.

And she closes them - has to - to shut him out.

The part of her that isn't destroyed understands immediately what she's looking at - a young man in the prime of his life and - even leached of color by the dead light - as beautiful as the day she'd lost him. But there's also something terrible and hard about his beauty, so untouched by time - all planes and angles and cold eyes, and a mouth set in an inscrutable line - that betrays a different sort of wear. He's almost all Fae now; there's very little left of the human about him, of the softness that so easily gave way to mischief and merriment and other pleasures of a more carefree era. Even his speech is that of his court, grave and gracious, curling around his tongue and falling with the smoothness of honey from his lips, but without any of the sweetness.

She covers her mouth with one hand and weeps into it, if only to buy time.

And the irony hits her full in the gut - it's the one thing no one ever could buy, not for wishes or all the riches in the world.

He waits until she's composed herself enough to force the words out. "You stopped aging."

"But only after I started."

"Why?"

"Which - the starting or the stopping?"

She already knows about the starting; he knows that she knows, and she knows that he knows that she knows, because everyone does.

"There are different ways to change." He says, in lieu of an answer.

"When?"

He laughs a second time, but this one's rich with the timbre of bitterness. A long silence follows, in which he must have held his breath as he considers his answer, before she hears him speak again.

"I suppose. . . the easiest would be to say it was when you chose your mortal. Which in itself has many whens - the first date, for instance, or the tropical vacation, or the wedding, or the consummation . . . I'm afraid that was when I lost interest." He sighs airily, and sounds - rather than pained as she might expect - only mildly perturbed. "But I suspect - not that I took notes, just to clarify - that it was actually far earlier. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it was when the old lady died."

She frowns. She's known of his fondness for her grandmother, who'd been kind to him at a time when no one else thought to, but surely she couldn't have been the reason.

"No - it wasn't because of her," he acknowledgs her confusion, "it was something you said at her passing."

"Something I said? What?"

"You said eternity was too long to love someone."

"Because -" she continues, as if in a trance, remembering -

" - no one ever had enough love to last forever." They finish together.

He shrugs, a barely perceptible gesture. "I suppose it must be why you chose to love a dying man - oh, I do not mean his sickness; all mortals are dying men, next to those of us who do not die. Better to live a short life full of love than centuries of emptiness after that loved had waned - was that not your mind? You spoke so plainly, with such conviction. I believed you for it, and in it I read your intentions."

She sits, frozen, unable to speak. Around her, reality crumbles like weights falling into an abyss.

At her silence, he steals her turn, his voice a whisper of corrupted wonder. "Although we could've done more with a waning love, you know, than any mortal with his perfect ration. And even after that love was spent, I'd have been happy to live the remainder of eternity remembering it."

Shards of evidence knitting together a new reality - such a different picture.

And still broken.

She turns her back on it, not ready to face what she might see when the pieces have finally settled in place.

"What happened to you?" She finds another way to ask it, and leaves it open, letting him choose which window through which to look backward.

"I became my father." His voice has become hard, and she remembers, as if it were just yesterday, when it had warbled in the unsteady tenor of a boy on the cusp of manhood. "I took his throne. When one becomes King, it's not a half-hearted affair."

"But surely you're not . . . like him?"

He's silent for a heartbeat. Then, "No - I suppose not. I don't care for the same vices. I never wed. And I have more blood on my hands."

His observation falls into oblivion at the end and leaves in its place a cold fist around her heart. Outside, the night noises carry in - leaves in the wind, cicadas in frantic conversation, distant cars on late errands - sounds of life moving on. Inside, something lies cold and dead, a second ending, twin losses in one day. She's struck then by how they are no longer the same, because their words are now the awkward exchange of present fact and past fallacy, when once they'd filled the space between them with the bright expositions of the future, living and vibrant.

She finds her resolve at last, not in renewed courage, but in that languid release that follows a despairing epiphany.

"I thought . . . you didn't want . . . us. I mean. . . you . . . you left."

"Because I believed you didn't want me." He echoes, but there's no bite; mere counter statement.

And in the lapse in their conversation, they look at each other, the blood cooling in their veins as they watch those broken pieces desperately rearrange themselves into what could have been, every crooked seam as jarring as the collage they have so sadistically conceived.

It is a masterpiece.

He sighs - the first sign of the boy he'd once been.

"Will you let me see your face?" He asks suddenly, and his voice is different, softer, as if after denying him so much, he expects her to also refuse him this.

She swallows, weighing the consequences, the pointlessness. "I don't think that's a good idea."

He cocks his head - a wolf curating scents in the air - and allows a glittering smile that brings back memories so sharp she has to suck in a breath.

"I know what age looks like on a woman," he purrs. "And I am certain you wear it well."

He doesn't know. He hasn't guessed.

She raises steady hands to her cheeks, afraid to let him see, knowing how plainly her skin tells the truth, fearing how it will - could - destroy him, even as his perfect, unchanged beauty had destroyed her.

Surely I have hurt you enough?

"Please." He's all human now.

She sighs, reaches out to the bedside lamp and flicks it on.

He gasps.

She reads it in his eyes, as he steps back into the shadows: he's been expecting wrinkles in parchment skin, a grandmother-shell over an immortal heart. For several heartbeats he simply stands, blinking, trying to make sense of what he is seeing instead - the smooth face of middle age, with cheeks barely beginning to round; strong arms, a still-fit body only slightly soft from having borne a child. He asks his question in the furrow of his brow, the catch of his lower lip between his teeth: Why?

"When you become a mother," she echoes his words sadly, "it's not a half-hearted affair. People would've noticed eventually that I wasn't getting older, even without the makeup. Maybe with just Bradley, I could've pulled it off - a trophy wife blessed with extraordinary genes. It's not uncommon. But no daughter wants to look older than the woman who gave birth to her. I had to age. Surely you expected that."

"Yes, but - why? " He repeats.

"Oh - that," she exhales, and smooths her nightdress over her body. "You mean - why I stopped. I suppose that was a mistake, too."

"A mistake." He pauses as he ponders this twist. "Did you . . . was I . . .?"

This is the moment when a gambler, understanding the stakes, lays his entire fortune on the table and plays for his life. It is all the risk in a single exhilarating, terrifying second.

She considers deception. It will be less painful (but for whom?). Instead, she chooses the truth - if for no reason other than a change from all the lies they'd believed all this time.

"Yes."

He sags, and part of her dies all over again. She supposes she should elaborate, now that the worst of it is out.

"She - my daughter - grew up. On her twenty-first birthday, I told her - what I was, how I was different from her father. She was old enough by then to understand, or at least old enough to notice."

"That you weren't growing older?"

"That I'd stopped loving him."

His expression changes to something equally inscrutable, and she continues. "Bradley was a good man. And I did love him . . . once . . . long ago. And all these years, while I chose to stay with him, I suppose I did care for him still. But there comes a time when you realize you're getting older, and you're going to grow old with someone, except he isn't the one you want to grow old with."

She looks dejectedly at him. "That's when I stopped. I told him - how could I not? And he wanted me to - to stop getting older, wouldn't let me become . . . like him. He said . . . he said if he'd known, he wouldn't have let me marry him. And now he's gone, and I couldn't give him that part of me. At the end of everything, he loved me more than I loved him. And. . . I can't go back."

The look he returns is almost as sad. "We would've never grown old, you and I. We would've stayed young forever. If only you hadn't left."

"If only you hadn't."

Just as there'd been no accusation in his earlier words, there is no malice in hers.

Only regret - that dull ache that is the thief of joy and light.

For this is its origin: an error in judgement, a cursed crossroads at which an ill wind of time - or chance - had turned the signs awry.

And this is its destination: an error in time, where not even the soundest judgement could save them: he fallen by the side of the road, and she taking the adventure that had beckoned her - each choice the cyclic effect of the other, and neither was at fault, even though both were.

How clear the road traveled looks on hindsight, she muses. And how easy it is to lose one's way, to be the one left behind, even if you weren't the one kept waiting.

He closes his eyes and sighs, and she feels it heavy in her bones - the weariness, his breath leaking away as if as if it were her own, like the decades that were now dust and memory.

"All this time," he says, when he can speak again. She doesn't even nod - it's taking all her strength just to keep from collapsing into the pillows and giving in. She's so angry, feels so damaged, so cheated, wants so much to wake up back at the start, with all her years restored to her, and believe this was only a nightmare.

"What now?" He steps back into the light, and he is so glorious that she can't look at him. She lets herself laugh, wills the shaking of her chest to exorcise some of the bitterness from her soul.

"Look at me -" she bites out, "- damned if I do, damned if I don't; I can't turn back time. I'm stuck in purgatory, paying for my mistakes, paying for what I've done to Bradley, to our daughter, to you."

"I meant - about us."

And there is something in his voice now, albeit a mere suggestion - it's different; lighter, warmer. She thinks she knows what it is, and it frightens her.

"Is there an 'us'? I'm old enough to be your - " She can't finish her sentence because her throat sears. "My daughter is older than you. And like my granddaughter often says, I'm afraid that ship has sailed."

"What is age but a construct of the mind?" He asks rhetorically, dispassionately. "It is not a true measure of years lived, life experienced, loves won or lost. You and I - we are where we are because we willed it so."

He pauses. "I could age . . . for you." His voice is very soft. "I did once, you know."

And now she is sure - the word hope comes to her, but she doesn't know whose: his, or hers. So she doesn't respond, although not because of coyness; she can't put him through hell again.

"Do you want me to?" He ventures.

She lifts her head and looks at him - really looks. She sees the magnificence of his stature, the breathtaking perfection of his face. She lets her gaze travel down his body, sheathed in the rich silks of his court, and allows her mind the indulgence of reconstructing how he'd once looked without them, of remembering the velvet feel of his skin against hers as she'd sighed between his lips, screamed his name, filled herself with him in ways Bradley never did, never could.

He's exactly as she remembers him - utterly unchanged, except for his eyes. She'd thought it was iron when she first saw them, so cold in the moonlight, but she realizes it now; without knowing the story, it's easy to confuse one brittleness for another.

She's done this to him - flash-frozen him in this instant in eternity, untempered and breakable as glass, though every bit as beautiful. He's as he should be - a young, strong ruler of his people, a deadly warrior, a formidable foe. If she says yes, he will lose it all, become like his father, tired and slow and ineffectual, hiding behind the swifter fists of his lackeys, easily deceived, even more easily conquered.

"I . . . don't think that's a good idea." She repeats.

He swallows, once more surprised by her.

"Why? Have you not even missed me all these years? Do you not still . . . love me?" He whispers.

Yes, she cries on the inside. And that's why I must do this.

On the outside, she says, "Once." But forever.

His face is stone as he stands looking back at her. Then he raises his chin slightly, as if collecting himself, and turns to climb through the window. She watches, feeling her heart shatter. Let him go.

At the sill, he pauses and looks over his shoulder.

"You lie."

She trembles. Don't challenge me. If you challenge me, I might surrender, and we will both be lost.

"If you no longer loved me, if you had been speaking the truth, it would have been written plainly on your face. I know what you look like when you are being true to yourself - it is an honest, open look, much like when we made love under the stars where no one could see or hear us and you held nothing back. I have not forgotten, even if you think you have."

Her trembling is now a violent shaking as he continues, "if you are hiding behind falsehood to protect me, know that I have no need of it. I would take you here and now if you said the word, and if it did not mean disrespect to the memory of your husband. Or do you fear that I will find you unlovely? I have known and loved your natural face for as long as I can remember - and you are this night as fair as the day I told you so, and the day you left me. Only do not lie because you think I will be made weak by years should I choose to age. Fae live for centuries with immortal bodies, young or old. For you, I would stop becoming my father, because I now have someone else to be - once more your lover and, newly, your King."

Her breath catches in her throat as he stands proud and tall against the night, framed in her window with the curtains billowing about him, and she realizes he has more to say.

"I know you well," his tone soft once more. "And I love you all the more for it. So now I throw the choice back at you - I will age for you, if you stay as you are to meet me. Otherwise, we will forever be in pursuit - I after you, and you growing older to flee me, always a hand's breath ahead, never satisfied by the capture. Does the irony escape you? That you'd stopped growing older because you no longer loved your mortal, only to age again, just to reject my love?"

He doesn't move from the window, although he turns fully back to her. "I measure two decades between us now - a mere score of years; 'twill go by in the blink of an eye. Will you wait for me?"

He lingers for her reply, letting the challenge hang in the air between them. She thinks of the boy and girl they'd been, of the years spent trying to forget the centuries between them, of predestination and free will and words like unrequited and unconditional and of the different faces of loss, and all their cruel names. She remembers the day her daughter was born and her wonder at the two halves of her heart - one the unbridled joy at bringing forth a child of a tender union, and the other the disappointment that it was not the face from her dreams. Finally, she imagines the future - she left behind when that child grew decrepit and sick, as her husband had, and their friends also, because she'd choose to always be the one saying farewell, the one ushering them on to eternal bliss.

Her eyes are cloudy with tears now, and she blinks them away to clear her sight; she has no doubt that he will keep his word, that this could be the last time she'll see him in his youthful splendor, stunning as a flower in its prime, and she wants to drink him in. Would she recognize his face when she saw him again?

Would he hers?

She breathes in once, and answers him.

-End -