"...yeah."

"...Fair warning if we're ultimately fucking off to my boyfriend's castle, uh, he has a daughter too. And she lives there. And doesn't hate him anymore."

"...how the fuck did he manage that?"

"An exchange we had the first time I talked to her--I told her that the fact that he tortured people didn't deter me from liking him because me liking him didn't make him do it any more than he otherwise would, and she said it had taken her several centuries to reach the same conclusion."

"...huh."

"Yeah." Sigh. "Part of me wants to reassure her sooner rather than later and part of me wants to self-injure attractively and then have more sex with you."

He laughs.

"I think I know which one of those I prefer. She'll keep."

"Okay--I'd better grab my soul, first, though, it does pain and it takes more than I'm willing to inflict on myself in injury right now to heal."

"Sure." Kiss.

She kisses him, and locates the correct fragment of dress, and extracts her soul.

Her soul: is informative. In addition to the things he already knows about her, it informs him that she has weird but solid boundaries and dislikes dishonesty and being jerked around.

It's pretty, too.

He stays well back from her while she's holding it.

She notices. "Oh, don't worry," she says. "Boundaries thing, it's self-protecting."

"Useful!"

So he goes over and kisses her again.

Mmkiss.

If he gets too close to the soul, he'll start noticing a pressure--gentle, at first, but stronger the closer he gets to it, as though he and the sphere were the same poles of different magnets.

Well, that's definitely a way for that to work. He doesn't test it. Kisses.

(It hasn't occurred to him that Siva doesn't have an ingrained habit of avoiding touching someone's soul while near them, or he would've taken his off and put it somewhere already, with all this closeness.)

(Kelora warned her; the habit isn't ingrained but she's avoiding it)

Kisses!

...And then the force around her soul cuts out.

...he wasn't testing it, but he was trusting it; he doesn't pull away in time.

--She collapses like her strings were cut. This would probably have solved the problem if she weren't collapsing onto him.

...yeah, that's - a problem -

He freezes up for a second, and then pulls her soul out of her hands and sets it on a pillow and lets it go.

She continues to be collapsed on him for another moment.

And then she straightens, takes his face in both hands, and kisses him more fiercely than all of the previous times put together.

He is confused, and then decides there is no use in being confused when he could instead be kissing this delightful woman.

She pulls away, briefly, and grabs her soul, and then she is covered in swirling red lines, none leaking so much that one might worry about bleeding out but each bleeding at least a little. And then she puts it down again and goes back to kissing him as much as physically possible.

Well.

Then there will be a lot of kissing going on here. Enough that he does finally remember she didn't grow up in Nuime, and he pauses kissing to take off his soul necklace and toss it onto a table by the bed where she won't accidentally touch it.

"I don't understand," she murmurs after a little while. "She said it would hurt..."

"It's rare - even rarer for it to be more than a brief accident - everyone knows you don't touch somebody's soul, everyone knows it hurts more than anything and people it's happened to would usually rather die than let it happen again."