Fandom: Slayers
Characters: Xelloss/Lina Inverse
Word Count: 576
Warnings: a contemplative monster cone and a bad tempered sorceress cuddle naked

Summary: Through slitted eyes, he watches and muses, that if he could, he would loath and adore everything about her in this moment

Notes: i've temporary internet and no homeWithout her armour, she looks tiny and small and innocent and breakable.

Her abundant red hair spills over her shoulder and unto the white pillow, curling sweetly.

Without her armour, draped only by the thin, clean smelling sheets, she looks like a lair.

Or so Xelloss thinks in the early morning hour before the light begins to paint itself over clay tile roofs. His own dark hair spilled over the inside of his pale wrist, crushed against the corner of Lina's pillow.

He watches the rise and fall of her chest, the dusky tip of a pink nipple where it peeks from sheet. The curve of her shoulder dappled with bright angry colored marks the shape of his mouth. The vulnerable hollow of her throat thrown further into shadow when she swallows. He watches it all and thinks:

a lie has never looked so truthful.

Through slitted eyes, he watches and muses, that if he could, he would loath and adore everything about her in this moment, lost in the hour that is neither dawn nor night, and she is so honestly lying to him.

But he is a monster. Such things are both beyond and beneath him.

So he does and feels nothing instead.

When the new day spreads its light like wildfire through the window, she blinks herself awake and flicks bright eyes to watch him back.

"How?" he asks.

Her fingers grip the pillow casing and her chin tilts. "Do you hate me being human." She says, amused and annoyed and clear. Answers and questions and no explanations needed and Xelloss' hands twitch.

His lips curve into a bland smile, but his eyes are open and so is he. Open and hollow and reticent, and he says, "You know what I am."

"Mm," Lina shifts easily, tucking into herself sleepy and languid. A length of bright hair tumbles down to lay slashed across her neck. Xelloss watches this too, inhuman amethyst eyes missing nothing. The sunlight streaming in through the window tangles itself in every strand of her curls and sets them ablaze and he is transported one thousand and fifteen years back and he is watching the sky seethe, the wind boil, and servants of absconded gods turn to embers.

He blinks once and breaks the gossamer film of a past as ancient as he is, yet the smell of ash and rich dragon's blood still permeates his mind and his smile takes a predatory glint and he watches her watch the flickers

of his mortal face. Though she is still soft with sleep, her eyes are sharp and piercing and academically rapt when then they focus on his own. In the astral plane, the solid black core of his real body pulses and Xelloss

feels it as a dull thump in his chest. His eyes slip shut then, and he is pulling her closer, blanket and all, arms banding across her back and around her hips.

To Xelloss, Lina is so very warm.

And he thinks that it is a lie; she should be burning with immortal fire and not human heat.

So he presses his vacant smile to her pursed mouth, and drags his hand from the dip of her spine to her hips to the apex of her thighs in a slow, staccato motion and begins to stoke the flames to forge her new armour worn underneath her skin and over her truth, rewritten as a lie, mortal soul.