Long pauses in dialogue had, within the last few hours, become quite excessive in the strained relationship between the harsh queen and her steadfast victim. This particular minute of no words spoken, however, felt quite unique compared to usual.

The silence was a sad one. Shining's shivering teardrops and strained breathing was the only background noise to break the quiet.

Yet, in some twisted sense, it was blissful.

It was as if every moment spend just left to their own thoughts, in the aftermath of words previously spoken... no talking... no torture... not even looking at each other, the two, quite frankly, opposite beings gained a little more understanding of both each other... and themself.

At the moment, Chrysalis didn't feel good about her work. As successful as she seemed to be in her task of torture, her stomach felt heavy, and she hung her head and sad shame as to not look at her broken victim.

As sadistic as she was, she felt sickened by her actions, and as much as that bothered her, the fact that she didn't understand why she felt that way, bothered her even more.

Had the stallion laying before her been innocent of war, she would have understood why her empathy betrayed her thirst for pain. But Shining was a soldier, a captain, no less. He was an enemy of the hive, an infiltrator and a bearer of information, and for all of that, she felt more than entitled to torture him as much, and as harshly, as she desired...

Yet, for the moment at least, she regretted the horrors she had put him through.

Soothing to her, on the other hoof, was listening to his painful, rabbit breathing get slower, steadier and calmer.

Shining felt her empathy and regret in the air. It was like a breeze from an open window, making the musty air from the changeling dungeon very breathable.

The final word she had spoken. Her simple, soft "no", answered in regard to his wonder that she wasn't torturing him now that he was so weak, resonated with him in its melancholy depth.

Right now, he felt safe. He felt safe with her because he knew she wouldn't hurt him, not right now.

The mare who had destroyed his body the point that he could never again even live without a constant reliance of a caretaker to feed him and change his diapers... made him feel safe. Even saver than he would have felt without her.

It was like her aura was protecting him.

The Chrysalis who stood by his side right now wasn't the cruel, maniacal tormentor, but the mother of thousands.

Her remorseful presence calmed him. Him calming down, in turn, calmed her.

This continuous quiet was a like mutualist relationship between the two beings, but no moment can last forever.

Once the calm euphoria had died down enough that just standing around in silence didn't feel better than doing anything else anymore, Chrysalis reluctantly took the initiative to approach the broken stallion as he laid there, helpless, legless,

His functional eye was red and swollen as he looked at the menacing queen loom in over him... Yet at the moment, he had no fear of her.

She leaned in over what was still left of her victim, looking at him with a soft, concerned, understanding gaze.

In the softest, most motherly manner she could speak, she gave him the insurance he didn't even need at this point in time, but certainly welcomed regardless.

"Okay shining..." she started in a calm whisper, gently caressing one of his cheeks wither her hoof.

"... No more torture. You get to rest now. Sleep out this session. When you awaken, I'm willing to try your proposal, if you're willing to do it my way," she explained still very calmly, but slightly more informative in her delivery while levitating a vial of morphine and a syringe.

She was thinking about adding a "for now" in addition to that "no more torture" line. But she did feel it a little too inappropriate for the moment being. And she was certain, Shining hadn't ruled out the possibility of future suffering, so there wasn't much need to put it into words.

Done filled the syringe, she injected him.

The stallion fell asleep within seconds after being shot, and the queen went to wash up in her dungeon's bathroom zink.

Despite having never tortured a single pony this gruesomely in her life, (not counting the occasional execution she held in her early days,) she wasn't very bloody at all. But she really needed to wash.

It felt cleansing to more than just her body this time around. The running water, trickling and cold against her hooves, combined with the soothing feeling of it splashing it against her feminine muzzle and it to dribbling down her soft, hole-ridden mane, helped her think much clearer.

Once she had taken an appropriately short moment of "me time", she wandered back to her sleeping victim with a wettened towel she collected from a small shelf beside her zink.

Slowly and with extraordinary carefulness, she began cleaning him up as well.

He was sweaty, bloody and hurt, but she did it almost surgical precision on his most tortured areas.

His lose shoulder and hip joints had already been bound up with roll bandages and disinfected, but she took the time to change those somewhat bloody bindings as well.

Once she had taken care of all of that, she carefully went to inspect his tortured cock, not knowing herself whether or not that thing could even impregnate her in its miserable state.

It was swollen, bloody, stretched and burned. The tip of its head so abused by red rod metal rods, that part of it was chared entirely black, and it's opening a torn and stuffed with stiffened blood.

She sighed audibly as she tried to clean it off as carefully as possible, hoping for Shining's sake more than her own, that he could get it to work in due time... But that was, in any regards, her getting ahead of herself.

She felt it fair that she would give this idea of his a shot, especially now that she in her strange, emphatic haze had promised him to do so, but she would still much rather see her hive got to stay the way it was now... Ant-like, fearsome, obedient. The thought of ruling a hive of rainbow antler-ponies didn't soothe her at all. But even a queen like her could bear to compromise a little... And Celestia knows if she ain't gonna need a bit of compromising skills when trying to get along with Shining Armor.

She looked up at the dungeon ceiling of pony-torture mosaics, thinking about the deal she'd just made, and whether or not she would regret it when push comes to shove... She doubted it would work... But if it did... Would she be happy? Would she even like it?

She let out a deep sigh as a small smile formed on her lips.

She felt defeated in some sense...

"What you aren't making me do for you, Shining..." she said out loud, knowing fully well the sleeping stallion wouldn't hear her.

She lowered her gaze down onto her prisoner. If nothing else, he would need to compromise a lot more than her. They were in two wildly different positions after all.

She was a Queen who fed on his very race. He was a prisoner of war... How much would them trying to date really change?

Not wishing to move his broken body more than what was necessary, she left him to rest in the toilet stall for another hour as she went to drink some love form her ever-dwindling pony-farm.

She would return to discuss their terms of "dating" once she was fed. And she would do so well knowing that she was the queen, but with the understanding that she would need to lend an ear to him... As long as he didn't offend her of course.

Author's Note

Sorry for the tame chapter. But this is a slow, slow story.

Hope you can just enjoy a little character development in exchange for very little story development