NOTES: For the 'Stages Of Love' challenge on LiveJournal. The prompt is 'romance'.
Shining Sea
The faint, rich strains of opera catch her attention as she pauses at a junction of corridors, and lures her into the dark shadows of the sleeping city.
She's drawn to the music, like a siren's call from the lonely sea. But when she pauses outside the balcony from which the music is coming, and the outer door slides back, the man leaning against the balcony railing isn't anyone she expected.
"Hey." His voice sounds like someone covered gravel with velvet; a voice that Elizabeth thinks could make love to a woman without ever touching skin.
The stereo sits in a corner of the balcony, the CD player spinning endlessly as he mellifluous tenor rolls over her like a heatwave. Her cheeks warm as she looks from man to music player. "I'm sorry to interrupt--"
Ronon shrugs. Somehow he compresses a lot of meaning into that movement, his body a language all its own. "You're not."
Her polite excuse for leaving gone, Elizabeth has no choice but to stand beside him, resting her arms on the rail. "Who introduced you to opera?"
He shrugs. "My parents."
The mention of the life he lost is so unusual, that Elizabeth's head whips around to stare back at him. "You...you had opera on Sateda?"
Something like laughter - or resentment - gleams in his eyes as he turns to her. "We're not all savages in Pegasus."
"I wasn't saying--" Elizabeth bites off that sentence and looks back at the black sea glittering beneath the midnight sky.
She's unnerved by his presence, by his closeness, by his scent. Ronon scrapes against her senses like a bow across a violin's strings, and while Elizabeth fears the discord, something in her wonders if he might not turn out to be a prodigy instead.
That aria finishes and the next one starts; one Elizabeth recognises - 'Caruso'. It's sung in Italian, but she knows the lyrics.
The setting is oddly appropriate for the words, and she wonders if Ronon realises it.
The music halts, the singer drawing breath before launching into the chorus. And Elizabeth stares.
Ronon is singing.
His voice is untrained and he's the wrong range, but he can hold the tune and does so quite well. It's nothing to the artist actually singing the song, but the velvet gravel of his voice slides down Elizabeth's spine like warm fingers.
She wonders if he knows what he's singing - of a man who longs for home and a green-eyed woman and a shining sea.
Then Ronon turns towards her, and she realises he does. The man and the green-eyed woman and the ache of his lost home and the shimmering, glittering sea are all a part of the here and now and not just in the yearning resonance of the song.
And Elizabeth aches beneath his gaze.
- fin -
NOTES: The next challenge prompt is 'passion' - unfortunately, being rather risque, it can't be posted at this archive. Check out my LJ ('tielan') for the story!