His Beloved Starlight

*SONG LYRICS: "Cosmic Love" by Florence + the Machine

**Quotes from 'Hamlet' by William Shakespeare

Adam Warlock swam with all the stamina he possessed in his body through the River of Souls, their tormented wails and shrieks echoing in his ears as he kept his eye on the very one he was pursuing through the quickening current.

A mortal human woman who wholly held his heart in her hands...

Her precious soul severed from her wounded body after she had sacrificed herself to save him.

He pushed himself faster and faster but she floated further away from his reach, swirling deeper into the whirlpool that would pull her down into an endless abyss of eternal darkness.

The farther she was dragged away from his outreaching grasp, the slower he was swimming in the river's never-ending depths, the other souls surrounding him in their mockery and the reveling of his failure to rescue her.

He reached out in one more futile attempt, his fingertips desperate to brush her limp hand, his agonized gaze locked on her peaceful expression of sleeping death. Her beautiful eyes forever closed; her sweet lips in a resting frown...

His mouth widened into a tortured scream as she remained out of his grasp, her luminescent soul glowing in an angelic halo... and she was swallowed up into the black cavernous heart of the underworld, gone forever.

In that moment Adam's entire world was lost, as though he had died himself... all the light in his life extinguished like a dying flame...

Adam's eyes shot open as he gasped for breath, though oxygen wasn't necessarily needed for him to survive. Perhaps just a reflex of being around so many humans on Knowhere...

He looked up at the all too familiar ceiling that he would recognize anywhere, his frantic heartbeat calming down as he felt the gentle rustling of movement within his arms. His lovely human paramour laid beside him, nestled against his bare chest.

An immense wave of relief flowed through him as he realized he just had another terrible dream...

All those weeks ago, he had been successful in retrieving her precious soul from the Underworld. And here he laid in her bed, both of them entangled underneath her sheets in the afterglow of consummating their love... an act that he would never forget in the remaining years of his lifetime.

When she had opened her eyes with the reunion of her soul binding itself again with her deceased body, he had never beheld a vision so glorious... seeing her smile again with the pain of her wound having vanished.

Until she had shown him how humans physically presented their passion and devotion for one another... her beautiful body displayed before him bare of any clothing, her long hair flowing around her face as she had hovered above him in her bed like an angel blessing him, her hands guiding him in the process of uniting her body with his own, their vocal harmony of mutual satisfaction as they reached the peak of romantic pleasure.

His arms around her ever so careful as they held her close, controlling his strength in the knowledge that she was still human and breakable, but her courage had astounded him in her action of pushing him out of harm's way...

She truly was his angel meant to be his salvation... and Adam to be hers. Her golden hero flying across the universe to bring her back from death...

"Adam?" Her soft voice pulled him out of his melancholy, her tangled hair brushing on his shoulder as she placed a kiss above his regulated heartbeat. "What's the matter?"