Title: Time
Fandom: Moonlight (Mick/Beth, of course)
Author's Note: I want to write. I am either too lazy or too unmotivated to actually do it, so this is a flash fic challenge I gave myself to write for 20 minutes, one POV. Minimal revisions.
She worries about the strangest things, the wrong things. About bullets and blood on her dress and if he'll grow tired of her before she's ready and whether it's okay for him to pay so much. Breakable bones, the pressure of pumping lungs, the infinitesimal slowing of her heart - these she doesn't give a second thought.
For stretches, he forgets inevitability. He thinks of her hair in the sunshine, her naked body next to him, her laugh, her swagger, the salt of her skin. He thinks of the beginnings of things, beginnings without endings. He was never good with endings.
It's how they ended up together - yet another time he couldn't let someone go.
She comes home smelling of an innocent's blood and he sees a thousand ways how it all will end, could end, will end.
He is scared. Terrified. He wants to sink in his fangs and suck away the fear. But there's an ever-present comatose reminder 2,000 miles away of how wrong it can all go. There's no way for this to end but badly. Her blood on his hands or someone else's. And so he's caught in a tangle of want and fear and hope and desperation. She wants it and he wants it and even fucking Josef wants it if only to make Mick shut the hell up.
They fuck nightly, an affirmation maybe, a distraction definitely. They will never make new life, but legs and lips and panting as they rush into each other, this is alive. She is alive. In his arms and untouched by time or trouble and he tries not to borrow heartache as he listens to the steady ticking away from first to last and tries to convince himself that he has forever to give.