| If we burn it down and it takes all night

[dont_feel_it]

There's no telling how long he sleeps. There's never enough sun to pierce the fog that swirls slow around the mansion, let alone the heavy curtains invisible hands draw each night. 

Somehow always without him knowing. Or noticing.

It makes for heavy sleep, in this heavy world, where nothing can touch him and the only thing that shakes him awake is his own restless mind.

Except this morning. 


Warmth seeping into his bones. The slow spread of a summer sun, the kind that rises determined, burns off the mist lingering on the water or in the trees. The kind that used to leave him pink and tender at the end of the day, wincing under the needlepoints of cool water in the shower. And when he blinks his eyes slowly open, he sees it. 

A haze of gold. Like blinking up at the sky through rippling water. Everything suffused with it in a cloud of light, until he blinks again and it resolves.

Into the slope of a bare shoulder. Her arm the gentle sweep of the shore. And tendrils of pale hair caught against the pillow. (Tangled with too-dark brown, that still edges wrong, even as he pushes the thought away.)

Skin sun-warm, peach-soft, as the tips of his fingers just brush over it. All comfortable curves and blunted edges in her sleep. Her features lighter than he's seen them in months.

(He hasn't seen her in months.)




He doesn't want to wake her. She needs to rest. 

But he can't help leaning into her warmth, the whisper of rustling cloth against bare skin, to brush the tip of his nose against the back of her shoulder, brush his lips across the same spot. Hand sliding to her waist, the rise of her hip beneath muddled sheets. Unable to do anything but breathe her in, reverent. 

Maybe the closest he's ever felt to a miracle. Of all the ones she's brought for everyone else, this is the first. For them. No matter what the Rev would have called him. Degenerate. Defective. Broken. All of God's orphans, adrift just like him.

But not in this moment. Not this morning. Not when they are a miracle just starting to finally unfold.

Not when Audrey is beginning to shift under his touch, and for a few early, sun-soaked moments, everything can just be.

Perfect.

Comments

[27yrsandwelldoitallagain]

It's soft pressure against her shoulder, then her arm, her side that pulls her. From the nest of a darkness and light and warmth, heavier than the heaviest bricks, thrown overboard. Shifting, moving, pulling her back, and back, until her mouth twitches and her eyelashes flicker as it continues. A ripple of warmth that consolidates into touch. A hand -- Nathan's hand, Nathan's fingers -- running down her skin, causing her to turn toward him.

Where he's already slightly pushed up, awake. Awake, and watching her with those eyes, all caught in the morning light through her window, and all she can think for a warm, fuzzy second is it wasn't a dream. The warm, and heavy, weight of that. The way she still has to lift her hand, to find some part of him. To know it more. This is real. And she can. Just touch him.

Without strings and barbs.

She can, finally.

Even if, from this angle, it's only the back of her knuckles finding his shoulder, and his neck, unable to look away from those eyes, his face, Nathan's handsome face, tucked down, so close he's all the air and light and shape of the waking world before her, Nathan, not able to look away from that, not even to help her own hand.