Could you do “I’m not losing you again.” with Dark?
The first time Dark loses you, it’s entirely by his hand.
He remembers it, vaguely, decades and his newborn state murking up the details, but he remembers the bigger things. He remembers clutching you within him, a piece of soul struggling to fit together with the others like Celine and Damien were trying. He remembers grasping you tightly and thrusting you out.
He remembers the look on your face when you realized what he’d done. (Slightly — the full gravity of it didn’t hit you until much later and by then, he was already gone.)
Getting you out, fixing you, so to speak was harder than putting you in there had been. But he did it. He saved you, pulled you from the grasp of your numbing prison and back into reality.
He held you close, that day, relieved that he will never have to lose you again. The danger and loss is over.
It’s his mistake that he forgets you’re still mortal, not as resistant to death as the rest of them.
He thinks how cruel it is that William’s bullet hits you twice. That he’s the reason you’re taken away from him twice.
It’s stupid how you’re shot the second time because Wilford isn’t fighting someone else, isn’t waving his gun around, isn’t standing with you on a balcony. You’re not in a situation that mirrors the first one (he is very, very careful to make sure that is never the case, just for his paranoia of this exact thing happening.)
(Except he didn’t predict (couldn’t) that Wilford would shoot you over something entirely unrelated from the manor.)
He should know better, in hindsight. Wilford was unstable in nearly every sense of the word. And while the outside circumstances may not be the same, he shot you once and all it takes is a niggling reminder to make him want to do it again, because if he shot you and you were still here, than you would be fine.
Wil pulls his trigger with a laugh and it all happens to slow for Dark to stop it.
“I remember!” He laughs giddily, your body unceremoniously falling to the ground at an awkward angle. The way you lie looks uncomfortable but Wilford pays no mind (how could he? He has no mind to spare).
Dark is shocked into stillness for a moment, worry seizing his throat.
Wil points at your fallen form. “Poker!” He declares, “with Damien. What a fun time that was.” He steps closer. “Say, have you seen—”
Dark snaps out of his stillness, his fear, at the mention of the manor and where that takes him.
“Leave!” He commands, pushing a palm of aura at Wilford, knocking him cold as he collided with a wall. He’s seething under his skin because how the fuck did he let this happen again?
He rushes to you, fingers fluttering towards your pulse points, pressing against your wrist, your neck, your heart, panicking when he feels the sluggish beats slowing.
“I’m not losing you again,” he says, shedding his jacket to ball against the pool of red forming in your gut. “I won’t allow it. Once is enough.”
Your eyelids are drooping, eyes unseeing as your consciousness begins to slip from your grasp.
“Stay awake,” he begs, nearly pressing the entirety of his weight on your stomach, knuckles white with how he’s gripping the fabric, fibers bursting with his strength. “You stay awake. Dr. Iplier is on his way.”
You try to smile, to breathe past the blood beginning to pool in your lungs, but you hack into his face instead, spotting it with blood.
“Sorry,” you whisper, vision fuzzing and starting to turn black.