"Saikirei."

"Nice to meet you," she says, with absolute and slightly intense sincerity.

He smiles, slowly.

"Nice to meet you too."

She beams at him, then shifts how she's sitting so she can rest her chin on her knees, arms wrapped around her legs.

"Do I, um, look kind of terrifying and uncanny? Because I am pretty sure that I do, but I haven't seen anyone in years so, um. I haven't been able to fix it."

"...well," he says. "Probably not any more terrifying and uncanny than me."

"Weird things have happened to my sense of terror and uncanniness. You're not uncanny. You could probably be terrifying if you tried, but you're not right now. ... Mostly I just want to fling myself at you and try not to cry on you."

...he blinks, surprised and confused and uncertain.

"I -" She scrunches a little. "I'm sorry, that was probably coming on too strong. I'll be fine. You don't need to touch me if you don't want to."

"I... I'm not..."

He shifts in his seat, gesturing with both arms at the crumbling walls of his throne room and implicitly at the ruined city beyond.

"I did that," he says. "I'm not... the sort of person people fling themselves at."

"Oh. ... Did you mean to?"

"Does it matter?"

"I guess not. It's been a while. And either way I'm not - I don't -" She stops, frustrated with her inability to say the thing she means.

"I don't care very much whether or not you're the sort of person other people would fling themselves at. I'm an unborn cosmic horror that gets more and more inhuman the more things I figure out how to do. I cry starscapes and don't sleep and don't need to blink or breathe air or eat. People probably wouldn't want to hug me, either. I care whether or not you want me to, and I care if I want to, and that's - that's basically it."

"...it's not that I think you shouldn't touch me because most people wouldn't, it's - it's that - I don't want it to be because you don't know."

"Oh. Fair enough, I'd be upset if someone hugged me under false pretenses and then turned out to regret it after they knew the whole story." She hugs her knees closer to herself. "I don't think I'd regret it unless you tried to eat me or something."

"Well. I won't try to eat you."

"And - do you - want to? I - I'd regret it if it turned out you found me gross and weird and didn't want to touch me, but did anyway for some reason."

"...I don't... know how to tell," he says.

"Oh. Okay. What are you feeling? Maybe I can help."

...he shakes his head.

"Okay. Take your time, then, feelings are hard. I don't mind waiting."

"I don't know if time is even the thing I need..."

"Oh," she says, in a small voice. She looks down at the ground. "Okay. I'm sorry. You don't have to figure it out if it's hard. I'll be fine. We can talk about something else."

A wispy, immaterial limb, which can't quite seem to decide if it's an arm or a wing or a tendril of swirling black smoke, reaches out toward her from the dark haze surrounding his throne and settles over her shoulders like a blanket of warm soft shadows.

At first she stays very still, afraid the slightest wrong movement might send it away, looking at it longingly and leaning towards it. When it settles around her shoulders she relaxes, snuggling it slightly and gently pulling it closer around her.

She smiles at him.

He smiles back, soft and tentative. The shadow-blanket wraps her up cozily.