-- ...I'm sorry, my mind wandered there for a minute. There's just so much to tell, sometimes it's hard to know where the tale leads next. Little details keep overwhelming the big picture. An example? Well, there was one moment I only heard about long after the fact, but the thought of it still leaves me shivering.

It was after they finally returned him to her, after his body was healed, after her voice had settled into that odd duality that flavors every song on the later albums. After they'd stared wide-eyed and silent at each other, long after she'd finally convinced herself he was real. She was curled up beside him, one slender hand resting on his wrist, singing. Nothing fancy, just a gentle flutter of notes, her voice a tiny bird settling itself into its nest, rustling and murmuring and waiting for the sun to set. She shifted; her elbow fitted itself into the curve of his hips, slid lower, pressed inward. When she sat up, startlement spilling from her throat, fingers scrabbling at the jeans he wore tight and low, he flinched.

Flinched, cowering, and almost immediately pushed himself forward, countering his own involuntary movement, pressing up against her hand... but not fast enough to set her mind at rest. Something had changed, her questing fingers told her. Something was wrong, his eyes said. She had seen him stripped naked, felt every inch of his skin against hers, and now something was horribly wrong, missing. Fingernails tugged at cloth, tore frantically at the metal teeth of the zipper - any other time she would have lost herself for minutes just in that unfastening, watching the zipper's prongs slide apart over and over again, but not now - and finally she was sobbing, beating her palms against his thighs, trying to fend off the strong hands that pushed her away.

She stilled, finally, humming almost under her breath, arms around herself. Waited; once again what little power she'd had was stripped away, and all she could do was huddle there on the floor, staring at him pleadingly, that low vibration of sound more pitiful than the whine of an injured pup. He stood, taking his time about it, turning slightly away from her as he shucked off the dark blue cloth, kicked them off his ankles, body now bare.

He turned again, his back to her. Caught his breath, a deep, shuddering sigh that seemed about to send him reeling. Ran his hands through his hair, pushed it back, away from his face.

Turned once more.

The flesh between his legs was scarred, criss-crossed with hundreds of burn marks, the end result looking almost like rumpled satin. They'd left him a slit, nothing more.

"Ruined," he said, and a wave of emotion poured out with the words, anger and frustration and shame and misery and disappointment, "ruined, not a man any more. Just a thing. Worthless. Nothing left of me but this." His sweeping gesture took in the four walls of the room, the cage, his own mangled body, her face staring up at him.

"I'm yours now. Even if they let me out, I'm nothing out there. At least..." he trembled and she shook too, sympathy, terror, she wasn't even sure what she was feeling, only that there was a deadly cold knot inside her somewhere.

"At least here you are a wolf, pack, beast, fierce hunter, swift stalker, singing to the moon. And I, I am the moon you bay at, the wind that keeps pace with you, the forest you race through, I am all there is in your world."

Ahh, that caught your attention, I see. Yes, she sang it to him for the first time then, imperfect, straining to find words to show him she understood. That was all she sang that night, and the next, and for days afterward, twisting the melody back and forth between those two voices she carried, one silken and gentle, one rough and shadowtouched. She sang it to him finally, the version that topped the charts for so long, showed him she saw what he'd become.

She let him see that she... approved. She was beginning to understand by then; a quick mind like hers can't ever be completely stifled and he'd dropped enough hints. She knew when - not if, but when - she tried to fight, he would be the whip they'd use against her. For that, for the betrayal she could already taste even if she didn't yet entirely comprehend it, for the certainty that from the moment he saw her, he was trying to win her affection and make himself into the perfect tool, for all of it, she was punishing him. If he was going to hurt her, her accusing gaze seemed to say, she was going to hurt him as well, hurt him first, make him pay.

It wasn't long after that when the nightmares started.

It's the same story that plays out everywhere, over and over. That, I've always thought, is why her music strikes so deep - it's pure, yes, pure in ways most singers can never even dream of, but it's things we've all felt. Seen. Heard. Done. It's our lives taken to such a point of clarity that it rips us apart to hear.

She sang now, night and day, only silent for the brief moments it took her to gulp down her food, swallow the soothing liquids that were brought in every hour or so, and catch a few hours of dream-filled sleep. She no longer sang to him, not for days, not for weeks, instead lifting her voice and that strange second tone to the mockery of a window or pitching it to occupy the empty cage. He was silent, curled up more often than not in the furthest corner of the room from her, eyes open, fixed on her as if the moment he looked away the world would fall apart. Days of this, and his eyes were dark-rimmed, body often trembling. After the second week, he barely ate, only touching food when it was shoved at him, when her handlers turned their attention to his weakened form and demanded he swallow enough to stay alive.

He wanted to die, and she... she was already singing his dirges, screaming her loss, knowing by now that her songs were heard by many ears and reminding each one how it felt to lose the one thing you love. Sometimes, when she slept, he would creep closer, stretch out beside her, not quite touching... not daring to. Simply being there, so that when she woke with tears in her eyes, convulsing from whatever horror haunted her sleep, for just a moment she could cling to him before she once again pushed hm away.

Both of them now were unclothed, filthy - she resisted any attempt by her keepers to bathe and her hawklike shrieks protested as well if they offered him the comfort of warm water. Both were gaunt, his body stiff from so often huddling in on himself, hiding from the gaze he knew she would not turn on him but feared regardless, her body aching from near-constant movement, pacing the room that was now truly a cell. She drove herself, and him, to the point of exhaustion, three weeks and finally a month passing before the collapse.

He had closed his eyes, tired, so tired... and when he opened them again it was to see her falter mid-note and tremble... her eyes roll up... and her body tumble gracelessly to the floor. A moment later his arms were around her and he was shouting with rasping, unfamiliar tones to the listening microphones to send for a doctor, lifting her up and walking unsteadily to the door, kicking at it until it opened and refusing, as certainly as she had denied them the right to help him, to let her go alone into the hands of strangers. The two guards who were first to the door caught only a single look at his face before falling into step, one in front, one behind, leading him through the maze of corridors with the unconscious Songbird still held tight. --