Selene froze.

At first she thought it was an auditory hallucination, Kai's voice near her. She stared at the sky and breathed out, watching the puffs form in the cold autumn air. After a moment, she looked over to the source of his voice, and stared in disbelief. He was really there.

Selene sprang to her feet and made to leave down the path to the other side of the grove, but Kai shouted, "Wait!" and moved too fast for her to get away, grabbing her wrist. Her skin tingled where he touched her, and she watched the ground, her chest aching.

"Um..." Kai's voice was quiet behind her, but also deafening, the only thing she could hear now that her blood pressure drowned out the faint sounds of cicadas and the city in the distance. She fell completely still and he adjusted his grip on her wrist to make it a bit looser. She felt a pang in her chest once more, trying in vain to ignore it and calm herself down.

"Have... you been avoiding me?" Kai said, and it startled Selene. Of all the things to say, she hadn't expected a question like that. She sighed and looked up from the ground, at the winding path and hedge before her. The moonlight cast dim blue light on everything here, and the light pooled around the bench she'd been sitting on and her feet.

"No, I haven't," she responded, grinding the tip of her foot into the path. "I don't know how I gave you that idea. I wish you would take things as they are and stop overthinking."

Kai was silent for a moment. "What do you mean?"

"If I was ignoring you, and acting as though I didn't  want to speak to you, then that should mean something. That means you need to stop chasing me around." Her heart squeezed involuntarily. Selene blinked hard, once, and tried to restore some kind of composure. He'd caught her off guard here. If she had been prepared to speak to him, she'd know what to say in a situation like this. She's be able to face him regally and gracefully, even though she'd disgraced herself in front of him so many times recently, revealed a bit too much vulnerability than was appropriate for the queen of Luna. Selene shuffled her foot against the path some more. "Frankly, I wish you'd stop. At this point you're supposed to be angry. And you're not supposed to be at the point where you're still grabbing at my hand."

With that, Selene ripped her wrist out of Kai's grip and clutched it with her other hand, wrapping her steel fingers around the sensitive skin that still felt warm. Ah, there it was. She betrayed herself. The queen of Luna would have calmly waited for Kai to realize his insolence and remove his hand himself. But she was Selene right now, and he wasn't the emperor— he was Kai. She wanted to run away, her insides burning with shame and guilt and fear, but she didn't move. After a long silence, she wondered if Kai already left, and turned just a little bit, catching a glimpse of his face. Her heart palpitated and she gripped her wrist tighter, digging her fingers into her soft human skin.

She hadn't expected this expression, either. His face looked unabashedly in pain, his brow knit and his eyes soft and vulnerable, his mouth trembling just a bit. This was Kai. This was not the emperor. This was the young boy that she'd manipulated and hurt for so long, who she'd tricked into caring for her. She felt her entire body seize up with unbearable pain and guilt. She wanted to smack that expression off of his face. She wanted to run away. Since she's hurt him so much already, shouldn't she leave it here, and leave him to hurt so much that he really starts to hate her? Selene started to go, but Kai's voice froze her in place once more.

"I've been thinking a lot about that, actually." Kai said, his voice once again slicing straight through her. Oh, stars. Selene was about to start crying. At this point, a single word from Kai could probably send her straight to her grave. Why were his words so nerve-wracking to her? She heard Kai take a step forward but then hesitate, her back still turned to him. "I think I've finally figured out how I feel about it. I am angry."

Selene started to run with just those words. She prepared to go, her legs already tensing up to take her as far away from Kai as she needed in order to forget about this whole exchange. But he didn't let her go, his footsteps fast behind her, grabbing her arm again, higher up near her elbow this time. She tried to rip her arm out his his grip again, but he held fast.

"Let go!" she shouted, yanking at his hand, grabbing his wrist with her other hand. He shook his head adamantly, and there was anger mixed in with the pain now, and just that expression was so potent that it made Selene want to shrivel up and die right then and there.

"If I let go, you're going to run away just like you did back then, after the Peace Ball!" he yelled, his grip tightening even more. "I want to talk to you! I want you to explain things to me, and I want to explain things to you! Back then, you just dropped those massive bombs on me and ran away. Don't you realize how much it hurt? How much— how confusing it was for me?"

Selene stared at the ground furiously. "That was the point. It was supposed to hurt. It was supposed to make you hate me!"

"Why do you want me to hate you so much?" Kai shouted, and Selene squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head stubbornly.

"I dont want—" she started, and then cut herself off with a dry sob.

"Since you want me to hate you, and be angry with you, shouldn't it make you happy that I said I'm mad just now? Why are you trying to leave?"

"It doesn't make me happy!" Selene screamed, finally mustering up enough furious strength to tear her arm out of his tight grip. "It's not like I was trying to make you angry so that you would act like this. I wanted to you to leave me alone. I wanted to pretend as though I'd never existed to you, and— if you were actually telling the truth that night, I wanted you to pretend that you'd never felt anything like that for me."

She finally looked back up at Kai's face, which was trembling like his whole body. She couldn't even decipher the emotions flitting across his face any more. He was trying to process what she'd just said, and she could see his anger. Of course, it hadn't gone as she expected. She wondered why she'd never thought he'd burst out like this. Maybe she still can't wrap her head around it.

"I'm sure you would've forgotten all about me if you had never seen me again," she continued, watching the shadows forming peaks across Kai's face, and the half of it illuminated by the blueish-white light of the moon. "But I had to come back here. This is unbearable for me, too, if it's hard for you. I'm just getting consumed by everything I could have done better, for Luna and for you. But things turned out the way they did for a reason. Part of it was out of my control, and part of it was painfully avoidable. I can't just go back to acting the way I used to, and I can't just start being all cosy with you. Can't you understand that?"

"I don't want you to be cosy," Kai blurted out, his voice shaking with his body. "I don't expect anything of you anymore. You betrayed all my expectations already. That's why I'm angry, isn't it? I thought you'd at least give me a proper explanation. I thought you had enough of a sense of duty to try to mend some of the things you've broken. And I want to explain, as well."

Selene's heart and wrist ached. Kai balled his hands up in tense, painful fists. She watched his hands, and then trailed her gaze back up to his face.

"I feel so insulted right now," Kai continued. "I guess I wouldn't have a few days ago, but I feel like I've sort of worked out my feelings now. I don't think I can just forget about the feelings I told you about after the Peace Ball. I don't think it's possible to think that way. The insulting part is that the fact that you said that seems to mean that you think those feelings were shallow in the first place. That I'm the kind of person who'd profess their love like that without being sure of what I felt." Kai looked up at Selene's face, and she took a step back as their eyes met. "I didn't like you because you're beautiful, or because you were kind to me. I'm the one feeling it, and I can't describe the emotion. It was never just about what you were doing for me. I was trying to figure out how I could give you strength and power like you gave me, whether all that was an act or not. For all that time that you were here, I was trying to understand you."

Kai set his lips together firmly. Selene felt weak in all her limbs as Kai opened his mouth to speak again, closed it, and then started speaking again with an even more resolute tone than before.

"Can we please talk? Please, let's sit down." His eyes were stronger than before. He'd calmed himself down, and his body was no longer shaking. "I have more to say, and I don't want you to run away."