Summary: Trance dances. Dylan watches. Dylan/Trance one shot.
Rating: G
Spoilers: None
A/N: This is really a little writer's block treatment that I wrote to help me get back on track with my other fic, 'String and Chewing Gum: Time Travellers'. It's pretty short, and takes place in the future sometime.
Morning Glory
Trance was dancing round their bedroom again.
Dylan watched her, fascinated, captivated. She twirled and spun and glittered in the light of the rising sun through their window, her hair whipping round her, loose. It was what she did when she was happy, content. Saying hello to the world, saying she was still there, glad to be, glad to breathe. Sometimes he got up and danced with her, spinning her, lifting her from her feet so she laughed with giddy delight. But most times he just watched. He only ever slowed her down.
She didn't dance every morning. The mornings she didn't, that was when he knew something was wrong, eating at her inside. A decision, a future she had seen, an echo of the past that had never been. She did that, letting things eat at her. She didn't like to talk about them. Her habit of playing the martyr got to Dylan at times, but he understood. Trance's problems were not the problems of the everyday. She carried the weight of the universe on her shoulders, literally, and she didn't want to burden anyone else. He knew the feeling, the guilt at dragging innocent parties, no matter how willingly they came, into the dark mire of your own destiny.
But today nothing worried her, not yet. The customary shadows of sadness had yet to collect behind her dark eyes. She was free to dance, weightless, around their room. For one who carried the universe on her back, she was very light on her feet.
Dylan sometimes wondered where she learned to dance like that, who taught her, whether she learned at all, or if it just came naturally to her. Sometimes he thought he saw meaning in the graceful movements, the symbols she drew in the air. He thought he saw a story, or a message, as she leapt and twirled and pirouetted, fluid gestures carving shapes and images in the air. He thought he saw whole worlds rise and fall in her elegant form, terrible wars and beautiful peaceful civilisations, entire races coming into existence and falling into extinction.
Other times he saw nothing but the perfectly controlled, fluid movements of his medical officer, totally absorbed in her own actions; beautiful yet baffling.
It was like no kind of dance Dylan had ever witnessed, yet it was every kind of dance at once. It incorporated human ballet with the movements of the Vedran Lucian Rituals, the complex Than scatter dancing with almost clockwork yet completely liquid traditional Indian dancing from Earth. Every movement was perfect, controlled, calculated, yet she was moving without thought, without understanding, almost on instinct alone.
When Trance danced, she glowed.
She leapt suddenly, from the floor to the blanket chest that sat beneath their window, and here she stopped, crouched, wresting her chin on her fist, watching as the sun crept higher into the sky. Dylan sat up properly in bed. She was finished, for she always stopped on top of the blanket chest, contemplating what lay in wait that day. He knew she was already playing out possibilities, flicking through the day like a bored school child skimming the pages of a book they are already supposed to know.
Slowly, Dylan pulled himself out of bed, and walked across the room to stand beside her. She was still fixated on the sunrise, dark eyes sparkling in the golden light. For a few moments Dylan watched the warmth slowly spreading over her face, picking out the shadows, the gentle, vulnerable features, the semblance of someone far younger than she was.
Then, gently, he touched her shoulder. "Trance?"
She started, and Dylan felt a twinge of regret at taking her out of whatever glorious world she occupied when in that state. But then she smiled at him, and he forgot everything that had ever made him unhappy. He crouched down next to the blanket box and leaned close to her ear, whispering, "Morning glory." Before gently kissing her cheek.
Trance smiled, closing her eyes, and leaning against him, "morning glory." She repeated.
And for a few minutes, nothing could hurt them.