Chasing Ghosts
Delving into the topic of love has never been his forte, yet the conversation arises time and a half again and again, during Monday lunches or Thursday range sessions. To his friends, love is an enigma that poses as equally fascinating a challenge as applying physics to their unending universe. Perhaps, in a way, love is kind of like space – it feels complete yet persistently adapts and expands and everything within it is extraordinary and beautiful, and it leaves the rest to evolve without ever truly changing.
With her, it's a similarly agonizing experience.
He's never read the 'signs' or considered romance to play as an open-ended option in their relationship; really, he just fell comfortably into it, fell comfortably into her. Their bodies just locked together naturally when she would meld her entire figure into the adjacent curves of his. Her lips were cruel, her cries were toxic, the sex was an addiction. He figured, at some point along the way, that he had fallen into love the same way the universe develops: gradually, but on a scale so grandiose and rapid it's barely noticed until there are twelve more sets of systems where a constellation used to be.
Perhaps there's something terrifying about that logic. To feel exposed, to feel like a speck of hellfire and stardust in a realm of unyielding misery and saccharine grace.
But not to him. Her personality is a supernova and her presence is the gravitational pull of a star, with fists that kiss like iron pipes and eyes that shimmer with auroral iridescence. His fear collapses into her obsidian pupils, engulfing him in the intensity of black holes, shredding apart everything that he has ever hoped of becoming on a distant sun without her.
He's renewed when she cries his name, is ripped apart at his very seams by her nails that claw into his flesh seeking an anchor into reality, and is reminded of his humanity with every bite and kiss and feverish nightmare that precedes the nights he sleeps alone. She's death and hell and heaven and life in a mortal body that offers him sin and rot and ruin. Yet he feeds her fire. Stitches passion under her skin with the rim of his teeth when he clamps on sensitive flesh, carves leagues of promises into her scars with fingertips as gentle as rainfall.
It's not enough, it rarely is.
He earns her screams through domination and submission and pain and lies, with synchronized heartbeats and words that poison his bloodstream. But it doesn't satisfy him, it never does. Not until she's begging for his mercy because she's reached her breaking point for the fourth or fifth or fifteenth time tonight, threatening to damage him and break his bones but never, ever pleading for him to stop. To keep going, to find that moment when they're driven to the peak of ecstasy and the universe detonates to swallow them whole.
He makes her scream – his name, words that go unspoken until the crack of every ethereal dawn, fragments and sentences and incoherent musings – until he's sure that she can feel their worlds colliding. That they are completed systems connected by a vast universe, draw together at their crumbling peaks by a force intrinsically complex yet incomprehensible in its simplicity.
And that's when he knows, for sure, that he loves her.
Loves her warmth and loves her dire, fundamentally insatiable appetite for destruction and creation and loves her for everything that broadens the spectrum in-between. Loves more than just her divine features, loves more than her dreams and her pseudo-realities. He loves everything that pushes up from the underside of her flesh, the hitches in her breath, the way she whispers his name and wants him close and needs him how a planet needs it star. She's her own nova, her own force and he's trapped in that loop.
Still it's not enough, not enough for him. The universe is expanding and there's never enough room, never enough, never, never never –
"Church…"
And then space, everything that it is, everything that she is and everything that consumes him converges all at once. They explode, ignite, a final time that realigns everything that used to be wrong with reality and morality and mortality. It leaves them speechless, breathless, grasping listlessly at the tendrils of their sanity that defines their memories. Sunspots and stardust and innocence diverging into collateral damage, into a realm that is alive with them and only, blissfully, thankfully, them.
It is the peace that follows that pushes his head into her shoulder, wraps weary arms around her scorching figure, binds them together like mangled strings of yarn.
It is the silence in her voice but the kisses on his face that truly welcome him home.
.
.
.
A/N: I just really love this ship. Hope you liked it!