"So," he drawled, taking a step closer, "I didn’t know your na was Diana."
Her eyes flickered, widening for the smallest mont. She was genuinely shocked that he found out... But then she sighed, ..."Well I shouldnt have expected nothing less than this.’
"And it suits you, the na." Xavier continued, tilting his head, his grin teasing. "Elegant. Regal. Dangerous." He leaned in just slightly, lowering his voice. "Though, I’ll admit... hearing it makes you feel less like a goddess and more like a woman to ."
A faint flush colored her pale cheeks, her composure faltering just enough for his grin to widen.
"You think you can reduce with words?" Diana asked softly, though the silver fire in her gaze wavered between challenge and... sothing else.
Xavier smirked, eyes gleaming. "No. I think I can uncover you. One word at a ti."
The palace air grew heavy, moonlight trembling in response to the unspoken tension between them.
For the first ti in centuries, the Moon herself was not untouchable.
Moonlight pooled across the marble like water, soft and pale, and the quiet of the palace felt as if it were listening.
Diana didn’t move at first. She held his gaze with that serene, ageless calm of hers—the kind that could still the tides—and yet, beneath it, sothing flickered. Not fear. Not hesitation. A ripple, faint as a sigh on a mirror-smooth lake.
"Nas are vessels," she said at last, her voice low and steady. "They hold fragnts of what we are, and what others believe us to be."
A faint smile touched her soft red lips, and even that asured curve seed deliberate, like the line of a crescent in the night. "Diana is a face I wear when I wish to be closer to the world. But she is no less real than the goddess you whisper prayers to."
"And which am I speaking to now?" Xavier asked, taking one more step, careful as a tide edging the shore. "The face... or the moon?"
Her white hair caught the silver glow and poured it over her shoulders like milk. "You’re speaking to a woman who has not been spoken to like this in a very long ti."
He stopped an arm’s length away, the distance neither invitation nor denial—an exact asure of respect. The closer he stood, the more he felt the quiet radiance that clung to her skin: the gentlest heat of tempered starlight, a warmth that did not burn but welcod. He could have sworn the world around them inhaled.
"I never wanted to worship you," Xavier said softly. "I wanted to know you."
"n who say that often want sothing," she answered, but the steel in her tone was softened by curiosity. "What is it you want, Xavier?"
"Truth," he said, and then, after a heartbeat, "and what truth does to a person when they share it."
A small silence opened, and in it, a traveling breeze found its path through one open archway. The sheer curtains lifted and drifted, drawing a pale veil between them and the night.
"Truth can be dangerous," she murmured.
"So can reverence," he replied.
Diana’s eyes—silver as the rim of a goblet in moonlight—searched his face. He let her. He had no armor on him here, nothing but honesty and a steadiness that had carried him through deeper darkness than this gentle room could rember. The goddess had given him challenges before; he had t them with fire and stubbornness. This looked different—quieter, more intimate, and sohow harder to face than any blade.
"Then tell one," she said. "A truth."
He obliged without flinching. "When I learned your na, a piece of the sky felt... closer." He exhaled, a ghost of a laugh. "And I realized I wanted to be close too."
When her gaze flickered again, it wasn’t alarm. It was the quick pulse of sothing warr, a line of color threading beneath frost.
"My turn," she said. "A truth: I am not good at... allowing." She tilted her head, the white cascade of her hair shifting like a drawn curtain of snow. "I command. I soothe storms. I yield the night to no one."
"Then you shouldn’t yield," he said, voice turning even quieter. "Not to . Choose ."
Diana’s lips parted. A hush moved through the room. He saw how carefully she weighed the difference in his words—how it t sothing older in her, the part of her that had learned long ago to stand apart from the world she steered.
"You are very bold," she said.
"You deserve nothing less."
The corner of her mouth softened, and the challenge in her silver eyes llowed to wonder. She lifted a hand, the motion as fluid as moonlight crossing a lake, and hovered her fingers in the space between them. She did not touch. She traced his skin, as if his warmth were a visible thing she could draw a constellation from.
"Xavier." She tasted his na like a note she was deciding whether to sing again. "What happens if I choose you?"
"Then," he said, "I will try to be worthy of being chosen."
"And if you fail?"
"Then I will try again." He smiled, not a grin this ti, but the gentle upturn that happens when a person decides to be bare. "And again. And again. Until it is morning, and the morning after, and every morning for as long as you ask. Not that it’ll ever be that way, cause I know you want just as much as I want you."
It had been centuries, perhaps millennia, since anyone spoke to her without petitioning the sky behind her eyes. Diana recognized devotion when she saw it. This was not that. It was steadiness. It was weight. It was a man refusing to kneel not out of insolence, but so that he could et her where she stood.
Moonlight gathered at her wrists like bracelets. Her hand lowered, closing the last breath of air between them, and her fingers ca to rest just above his heart. The contact was almost nothing—a brush, a whisper—and yet it ran through him like the first cool drink after a long road. He felt her before he fully registered the touch: a presence that was not purely divine, not purely mortal, but a moving boundary between the two. Her palm ward.
"The night listens," she said quietly. "Will you?"
"Yes."
"Then listen to mine." Diana drew a breath that eased from her like a tide going out. "I am tired of distance. I am tired of being a horizon people cannot reach." The soft smile remained, but it had a gravity to it now. "I would like, for a while, to be sothing more ordinary. Sothing as simple as a woman who chooses. I want to experience the pleasure too. Lily doesn’t mind, so I ask you is it too much to ask"
Xavier smiled, then he moved. He could not help it; he leaned in until his forehead almost brushed hers. The chilled perfu of night flowers drifted from the gardens; sowhere far, a nightbird called once, as if to mark the mont.
"Then choose," he said.
She did.
Diana’s other hand rose and cupped his jaw, a touch light as the edge of a silk ribbon. She studied him up close, the way one studies a star that has wandered nearer than expected. Her thumb traced the line of his cheek. "You are very human," she whispered.
"I am," he agreed.
"That is not a flaw."
"No," he said. "It’s a promise, being normal would you ordinary too."
And with that, she kissed him.
It was not sudden, and it was not hesitant; it was deliberate, like the moon deciding the exact shape of its light on the sea. Her lips were soft and cool at first, the chill of night air carried on warmth that unfurled as she lingered. He matched her pace, careful at the edges, patient at the center. The kiss deepened not from hunger but from an intentional closeness, from the patient discovery of a language neither of them needed to rush through.
When she drew back, only by a finger’s width, her breath mingled with his.
"You said you wanted to uncover ," she murmured.
"I did."
"And now?"
"Now," he said, "I will."
His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, a reverent stroke that seed to straighten the line of her composure and make it a curve instead. She kissed him again, slower, and he answered with a deeper tenderness, letting his hands find the simple, honest places to rest: her shoulders, her waist, the small of her back. Each touch asked a question and waited for the answer. Each answer arrived in the way she leaned, the way she sighed, the way her fingers threaded at last into the hair at the nape of his neck as if to anchor them both.
"Xavier," she breathed, his na like a low bell, "you are warm, I’ve never felt this way in a long while."
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