seaside
did you sail across the sun?
did you make it to the milky way to see the lights all faded,
that heaven is overrated?
#
Scorpius dreams himself awake to the sound of the surf hitting the shore and a quiet breathing beside him. He stirs, and a hand comes down on his shoulder, delicate and small. Almost immediately, he knows it's her. She's back.
"I've always loved it here," she says quietly, her eyes on the starlight reflected in the water before them. She looks different, her skin sun-kissed, her hair lighter. He wonders where she was this time.
He sits up straight on the blanket he's spread out on the sand, unable to take his eyes off her. He wants to ask her where she's been, where she's going next. But Dominique has never been the forthcoming type and he doubts she will start today.
"Do you come here a lot?" she asks, finally peeling her eyes from the endless sea to look at him. There's something different about her eyes, about the set of her features. Scorpius is not so naïve as to say that she had been innocent before, but now he fears that any bit of it she may have possessed is now gone.
And he wants to tell her (he really does) that he's come here every night, ever single night since that one they spent together under the stars, waiting for her to come back every time she goes on her trips to find herself, hoping that the magic of their special stretch of beach would lure her back home, back to him.
"Yeah," he ends up saying, because he knows that night didn't (couldn't) mean much to her. It was just a one time fling anyway, just a roll in the hay. He's just someone who had been at the right place at the ohsoright time and it meant so little to her, but everything to him.
She looks over at him and for just a moment, he thinks that maybe she knows what he's thinking, that she sees it on his face, but the moment's over and she's nudging him to the other side of the blanket to make room for herself.
She lies down next to him, her long hair falling over his face, and closes her eyes. She smells like sunshine.
"I'll just close my eyes for a second," she whispers with a yawn.
Scorpius watches as she falls asleep, knowing he should say something—anything—but unable to get his mouth open. Just as he thinks she's lost in dreamland, she sighs and says, "It's good to see you again, Scorp."
He watches her until he falls asleep, too.
Scorpius dreams himself awake to the sound of gulls calling, the feel of sun warming his skin, and no slow breathing next to him. The scent of sunshine is gone, and so is Dominique.
For a minute, he just lies there on his back on their seaside hideaway from the world and beats himself up for losing his chance but he knows deep inside that he never had a chance to begin with. Dominique, she's a shooting star, she's gone places and done things he's never even thought of on her trek across the skies. He's just one of those other, boring stars that's stuck in a constellation and won't go anywhere or do anything because those stars, they don't move, they just are.
But in the end, even a shooting star has some place to come back to, and Scorpius is stuck in this constellation anyway so he'll just wait for her to come back.
#
Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?
A/N: This fic was written in response to the July 1st entry at the Prompts, Oh Prompts thread over at the NGF forum to the prompts: beach, fling, and "Drops of Jupiter" by Train.