Title: The Subject
Pairing: Daniel and Vala- established relationship (only D&V)
By: Bkwurm1
Rating: PG
Summary: The first night after they have moved into their new home, Vala brings up a subject that has been on both their minds. General fluffy coupleness.
The Subject
"FYI," Daniel volunteered as he stepped out of the master bathroom and rubbed a white towel against his short, wet, sandy brown hair, "the water pressure is great." Across the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor between several stacks of boxes, Vala glanced over her shoulder and grinned.
"You're welcome. And you teased me about blowing up our brand new home."
Walking to the foot of their queen-sized bed, he bent over and grabbed from the open suitcase sitting on the floor a fresh black t-shirt. He pulled it down over his head. "You thought I was joking?"
"Ha, ha."
Vala pulled a final leather bound book from the box she was emptying, stacked it with the rest, and then got to her feet, dusting off her hands and stretching as she stood. Daniel leaned against the bed frame to enjoy the show. She ignored the way her cut-off denim shorts rode up to frame her luscious bottom, but took time to tighten the knot securing the tails of her blue-checkered shirt, deepening the curved valley already exposed. He kept his groan to himself when she flipped her long, dark pigtails over her shoulders and sauntered her way toward him.
"Daniel, you are hilarious as always."
He shrugged his shoulders high and flashed a too innocent smile. "You have to admit, pressure valves and hot water heaters are a little out of your normal skill set."
She placed one hand on the soft cotton covering his chest and rested her other wrist against the tendons on his neck. The tips of her fingers slipped through the wet fringe of hair clinging together in clumps at the base of his skull. "Darling, after years on my own as a... purveyor of specialized imports and exports…,"
He interrupted with a tweak to one of her incongruous pigtails. "Oh, is that what we are calling it now?"
"Hush," she whispered in her throaty, lilting voice and tapped him on the chest with her forefinger. "By now you should know surviving in my former line of work required a near endless reserve of talents."
He curled his arms around her waist. "The real talent being getting out of sticky situations before they completely stuck it to you." She shrugged.
"The important thing to remember is I always got out. Eventually. And now I've moved on to our little company of friends, basically living the sedate life of a consultant." He raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth, but she cut him off with a quick peck to the lips. "Yes, that is also what we're calling it now."
"So all that being said," he paused, cocked his head to the side, and frowned, "Are you absolutely positive the water heater isn't going to explode?"
"Daniel!" She pushed against his shoulders and when she would have spun away, he laughingly caught her wrist and gently tugged her back into his arms for a longer kiss.
A moment passed before she turned her head to the side and lightly pressed her fingers against his chest. "Uck, I'm covered in sweat and dirt from all the boxes at your storage locker."
"Which," he grumbled, "is why you were supposed to join me in the shower."
"I got distracted by all the unpacking."
Daniel pulled back and watched Vala's face as she peeked over his shoulder and surveyed the cluttered chaos in their master bedroom; her eyes lingered on the bare walls, the stacks of half, unpacked boxes and the shoes and clothing starting to fill their walk-in-closet. Her grey eyes were unfocused and a soft smile curled the corner of her lips. A pleased sigh slipped out while she shook her head. "Our house is a complete mess."
A sweet joy squeezed next to his heart. He gently rubbed a smudge of dirt from her cheek and smiled out of the side of his mouth. "You know most people don't grin like they won the lottery when they say that."
She stood up on her tippy toes and looped her arms around his neck. "But it's our mess. All your old collections, boxed up books and stuff mixed up together with my clothes and trinkets and things I bought for the house with your credit card."
"Our credit card." He steadied her with his hands at her waist. "One of the perks of being married is now you have to see the bill each month too."
"Yes, exactly." She bounced on the ball of her feet again. "All our money smooshed together so we could have this big, pretty place. Lots of green space outside, tall windows, gorgeous skylights, room for your library and my office, a man cage in the basement and still left with plenty of open bedrooms."
"Cave, not cage," he corrected automatically.
"Really?" She tipped back her head and pursed her lips when he nodded. "Pity. Doesn't have quite the same ring, does it. But as I was saying, that still leaves us with plenty of open bedrooms." Something flashed in her eyes, a fleeting vulnerability he wouldn't have caught if he didn't know her as well as he did. He wondered if he knew what she was going to say. Vala was always the braver of them, speaking the desires he barely admitted considering.
Chewing on her lower lip, she looked at him from beneath her lashes and twisted a little closer. "I was thinking about fixing that."
"You want to invite company?" He asked aloud even as he dismissed his guess in his mind. His thumbs brushed along the narrow strips of skin exposed at her waist between the bottom of her shirt and the top of her cutoffs.
"Having our friends stay with us when they visit does sound like marvelous fun, but I was thinking more along the lines of filling the rooms with … family."
"You want your dad to move in with us?"
Her jaw slackened and her eyes bulged. "Good lord, no." His chest started to shake. Her horrified expression almost made him feel bad about teasing. She stiffened in his arms and slapped her hand over his mouth. "Don't you laugh and don't ever say that again. I swear it'll leak into the cosmos somehow and he'll show up on our doorstep."
"I'm sorry," he snickered between her fingers and pulled her into a hug, rocking her against his chest. "Cheap shot. I'm sorry. Let me make it up to you."
She squeezed him back. "I suppose I can let you try," she said and then squirmed away with a teasing grin. "Just as soon as I get out of the shower." Laughing, she darted into their master bath and locked the door.
XXXXXXX
"Daniel."
He slowly exhaled and instinctively turned his head toward his wife's luring voice. His eyelids fluttered but felt too heavy to move. He was warm, relaxed and just conscious enough to understand that the long day had caught up to him while he'd waited for Vala to join him in bed.
"Daniel?"
He stirred, aware now of a bright glow filtering through his eyelids and the familiar weight of an open book resting on his chest. He recognized the strange pressure of his glasses sitting too far down his nose and identified the warm scent of sweet, tropical scented steam wafting in from the bathroom.
"Daniel!"
Adrenaline slammed through his system. "What! What?" He scrambled to sit up as best he could with his legs trapped beneath the dark blue covers. He ignored the thump his book made when it hit the floor and snapped his head back and forth, quickly scanning the room. "Vala, what's wrong?"
"Are you awake?"
Heart pounding, he flopped back against the pillows. "Are you kidding me?"
Vala walked around to her side of the bed and climbed in. "Well how was I to know? You're here with the light and your book, for all I know you could have been reading."
He twisted his head up off the puffy pillow and gaped at her through narrowed slits from behind his wire-framed glasses. "With my eyes closed?"
"You were supposed to wait up for me and with the light reflecting on your glasses…fine. What about meditating then? Meditating is a perfectly reasonable conclusion," she suggested as she leaned in against the length of his body. He could feel the cool silk of her nightgown steal his heat and any genuine desire to fight.
He sighed, rubbed at his eyes, and set his glasses on the nightstand. "Fine, if you say so."
"Good. Now getting back to the subject," she said and settled her hands on his chest.
He opened his eyes. She had her fingers laced together with her chin propped up on her thumbs staring up at him demurely. God, she was adorable. "What subject?"
"You know, the subject."
"The bedrooms?" A yawn helped to clear his mind and he scratched at where his t-shirt was rubbing against his collarbone. "I thought we'd finished talking about them."
"Darling don't be silly. Maybe you finished but I was just warming up."
He placed his palm over her finely boned fingers and with the pad of his thumb, skimmed the sensitive skin beneath her wrist. He was certain now he understood the question she was hinting about. It was a conversation he wanted, but her warm curves were pressed against his side and tonight was the first night in their new home.
"Do you really want to keep talking tonight? Couldn't talking wait until morning?" He asked.
The loose dark cloud of her fragrant hair brushed against his neck as she shook her head and pulled away. She flipped over to face the other direction. His side felt cold with her gone.
"We have work in the morning. Well, I have real work to do," she muttered while punching her top pillow into shape. "You on the other hand are going clear across country to research at that woman's private library. For you, that's like a free luxury weekend jet skiing in the mountains."
He rolled his eyes before he rolled over to face her back. "Just skiing in the mountains."
"What?" She asked, lifting her head off the pillow.
"You said jet skiing. You know, the machine you ride in a body of water, not frozen flakes piled on a hill."
"Don't change the subject."
He leaned forward, half sitting up. Starlight filtered in from the skylights perched over their bed, spotlighting the stiff line of her spine. "I'm not. We've been over this. You told me to go."
"Of course I did," she said punching at her pillow again, "but since when do you listen to me?" A thread of emotion thickened her voice.
"Hey. Stop that." Carefully holding her shoulder, he urged her to face him. When she lifted her grey eyes to meet his, he brushed strands of her wild clinging hair back from her cheek. "I listen," he insisted. "I'll always listen." When one of her delicate dark brows shot up, his eyes slid away and he bobbed his head side to side, "Well, when it's not crazy talk."
He felt her body relax next to him. A small smile found her lips. Her fingertips slid gently along his jaw line. "Actually Daniel, you do have a most endearing habit of listening even when it is crazy talk."
He shrugged and again brushed his fingers back through her hair. "Kind of hard to sort out which is which. Ouch!" He rubbed at the pinched spot on his side and scowled.
"Take your lumps darling," she instructed and then nudged him onto his back so she could resettle against his side with her head lying on his chest. "Now getting back to the subject."
He traced his fingers down he curve of her spine and breathed in her sweet citrus scent. She shivered under his hands. "I still think we can address it much better if we picked up where we left off."
"You mean before you fell asleep?"
"I mean before you kept me waiting."
"Well," she teased, tilting her head back to nibble along the column of his throat, "what are you waiting for now?"
He blindly reached with his left hand to turn off the bedside light and then rolled toward his wife. "Just you. Always you."
XXXXXXXXXX
"Daniel?"
Her sweet voice reached out for him in the night. The soft weight of her head lay on his chest and the smooth silk of her skin pressed against his. The position of the constellations visible through the skylights told him a few hours had passed since they'd made love and fallen asleep.
"I'm awake. I'm listening."
Vala traced a pattern on his stomach, a nervous motion not meant to seduce or tease. "We never talked about … the subject before. Maybe you think it's a terrible idea."
"No, no." He pressed his lips to the soft hair crowning her head and reached for her hand. He laced their fingers together and squeezed. "I don't. It's just a hard topic. There was a time in my life when I thought I'd missed my chance at … filling up extra bedrooms. When Sha're died, I stopped thinking about that kind of life"
His first marriage felt like it happened to a different person. He'd been impossibly wide-eyed and naïve in a way only life and the passage of time could change. He'd long stopped being naïve. He wasn't the same man anymore and even before Sha're's death, there had been dark nights when he wondered if what they'd had would survive the man he'd grown into. After her death, his continued doubts, the pain and the guilt pushed him to close his life off to anything but work. Even his closest friends stopped trying to break through his shields, but then came Vala. God, she was stubborn and maddening and exactly what he needed.
He squeezed her hand again. "Before you came along, I stopped thinking about a lot of things that had to do with really living." Vala lifted their joined hands and pressed a kiss to his knuckles.
"And I never stayed anywhere long enough to start dreaming," Vala said. "For so very long, life was too hard. And I was broken. The idea of bringing an innocent into it all was unthinkable. I told myself I didn't want the attachment anyway. The responsibility, the commitment. I spent my childhood never knowing when or if I would see my father again. I would never put a child through that kind of life."
He tightened the arm around her waist. Her wit and super nova smiles made it easy to forget the pain Vala faced as a child and the unspeakable horrors she endured as an adult. Somehow her spirit survived and her natural empathy reemerged; two of the most miraculous gifts bestowed by the universe.
She held his hand a little tighter. "Then the choice was made for me and I was pregnant. I didn't expect to feel…," she shook her head and wiped at her eyes. "Even though that went as badly as anyone could possibly imagine - I still remember that foolish, unexpected, early hope."
He shifted under the covers so he could wrap his arms around her. She felt small and light against him, too frail for what she'd already survived, but in truth, she was one of the strongest people he knew. She fought, she survived and for some reason she trusted him with her heart. He blinked against the wetness filling his eyes.
"It wasn't your fault. You didn't do anything wrong," he said.
"I know or at least I do most of the time but I want…I have so much now…a less selfish woman wouldn't wish for anything more."
"It's not selfish; it's brave. You are the bravest, most courageous, stubborn, crazy, loving woman I know. You dragged me back to life and you make me want…everything."
Her hands slid around his neck and she pressed her cheek against his, holding him like he held her. They both were broken, but together the pieces fit. He feathered kisses on the shadowed corner of her temple, letting his fierce love for this woman, his wife, his partner and best friend wash through him. Hundreds of years ago, from millions of miles away, the stars looking down at them released the twinkling radiance that tonight softly filtered through the skylights of their home. The universe was infinite, but he'd found his treasure.
After a while, Vala relaxed enough to softly curl again at his side. He breathed against her silken, midnight hair with her breath warming the curve of his neck, their fingers threading together, breaking apart to skim over matching curved metal bands before lacing together again. Their raw emotions melted together into something calm and dreamy.
"Sooo…kids?" She whispered.
"I suppose we should probably buy a couch first, but yeah, kids."
"As it happens, I've already purchased a ridiculously large, leather monster off EBay. By the time you get back home Wednesday, it should be here."
"EBay?," he hesitated. "Maybe…never mind, I trust you. About my trip. If you really don't want me to go…"
"I trust you. I may never want you to go, but I do love it when you come home and this time, you'll be coming back to our home. Our future. Whatever it holds."
He heard the smile in her voice and softly laughed. "I married an optimist. How in the hell did that happen?"
"Hmm, it's like Mitchel's grandmother used to say. Something about bad associations spoiling good habits."
"So it's my fault?"
"Stop complaining." She snuggled against him. "We can figure out why you're to blame in the morning. In the meantime, I need my rest."
Daniel smiled into the darkness and held his future a little closer He closed his eyes and said, "Sounds fair, after all, you have the rest of our lives to plan."