There is a crack in everything (that's how the light gets in).
Set sometime in the future – call it a possibility, of sorts. (Maybe you could look at it as a justification of one of my favorite possible pairings in this series?) Title's taken from the 31 Days theme for May 30, 2007. This goes out to Karen, one of my nakama-in-crime. MORE POWER TO 1896 YO!
She is up before him this time – a rare occasion, given the fact that he is a light sleeper and fundamentally inclined to trust nothing and no one. She finds herself curled up at his side, hair tossed over one shoulder, chin propped on one hand. She is content with watching him breathe: her fingers skim through his hair and occasionally linger for longer, to brush some stray bangs away from his face. Distance (and the occasional lack thereof) is what defines them now. The older foundations of their relationship – violence, confusion, deception and hate – had crumbled away years ago, partially out of need, partially out of inevitability.
His awakening is in that soft sigh and that knitting of eyebrows: she withdraws her hand, to better watch him re-engage their reality. She is no longer bothered by the fact that he frowns at her if she's the first thing he sees in the morning: it only means that he acknowledges her enough to be displeased by her presence.
"What time is it?"
"Too late to be productive."
She answers him in this way deliberately, because it is her way of measuring his mood. Their years together have showed her that his general disposition in a day never changes regardless of what happens between waking and sleeping. He only scoffs at her and rises from the bed; this tells her that he is in a good mood, or at least patient enough to humor her.
They eat breakfast at opposite ends of a long table, and only speak when necessary. They do not shower together, as most couples who are sleeping together may be inclined to do. They change in the same place but not at the same time; he passes away her time in their walk-in closet by smoking a cigarette, and she passes away his time by reading a book.
"…Ah. Wait a moment."
She walks up to him when he steps out, oblivious to his raised eyebrows. He holds still as she adjusts his collar, fixes his tie. They fit together without pressing together, with his eyes on her hands and her hands touching the fabric of his clothes, not his skin. Only one other person has ever gotten this close to him, and the end of that affair had nearly destroyed him. Being abandoned by that man, the one person who had managed to break his world apart and recreate it in his image, was a fate worse than death for a fighter like himself.
She remembered those times, and recalled, with a pang of sadness, the way he had looked to her, pacing down corridors like a caged animal, wild-eyed and lost and too proud to admit that he was broken. She could not, however, place that exact moment when he had finally crumbled and she had been there: an accident, born out of an unhealthy fixation with old enemies and past regrets. Their story from that point on became a lesson in acceptance.
"There."
Their kiss is a brief brush of lips; there is more contact in the way her hands shift, slipping between his coat and shirt, moving across his chest than over his shoulders. He does not move to touch her back. He left his marks the other evening; that, for him, is enough.
They part ways in silence, taking separate cars, going in separate directions. It will be evening by the time they come together again, to strip off their clothes the way soldiers remove their armor and to study the battle scars – old and new, visible and invisible – on each other's skin through tongue and gaze and fingertips.