"Cast Your Sleeping Hearts Awake"
by: singyourmelody
Author's Note and Disclaimer: Don't own these characters. I didn't think I'd ever write another Nine Lives of Chloe King story since I really loved how "Promises, Swear Them to the Sky" turned out, but I am supposed to be writing a paper and somehow this came out. It's different. And slightly AU in the beginning and then has spoilers for the finale. And . . . I just don't know. Feedback is most welcome. Title is from White Lies' "Death," which just seemed to totally fit.
So the thing is, she kind of hates him sometimes.
She hates him when he purposefully beats her during training after she has had a hard day or when he ignores her for three weeks because she talked to Brian again or when he makes out with other Mais just because he can. Yeah, she hates him.
And it'd be so easy to leave it at that, to stand on the right side of the line between love and loathing and to never look back.
But then.
Then he shows up unannounced and tells her they belong together and kisses her like she is the only thing that has ever mattered to him in his whole life and well, the line becomes blurry.
Blurry is gray areas and undecided futures. Blurry is confusion and uncertainty and blonde hair falling into piercing eyes and blurry is where she lives.
She's built a home there it seems. A nice little two bedroom, two bathroom, with a white picket fence and a dog named Stewart. Eventually, it becomes comfortable, her normal, a place she knows well.
So naturally, he kisses her again.
And then blurry isn't enough. Nothing is enough it seems. Not Brian, or her mom, or school or her job. Not even being Mai.
There's more out there and it's waiting for her and she decides to take it.
She shows up at his door.
She knocks twice and he answers and thankfully he's alone, because she kisses him without a word and he doesn't even hesitate to kiss her back and she momentarily wonders how she could have ever been confused at all.
(The hazy complexity of it all will return. She knows this. This isn't a permanent fix.
There are no permanents anymore).
But she keeps kissing him and she doesn't stop.
Neither does he.
Later, the pads of his thumbs trace over her closed eyelids as if he is trying to make her see.
And yet, she can't bring herself to open her eyes.
They don't talk about it.
Well, she doesn't. He tries a couple of times (unsuccessfully) and her brief moment of illusion and wonder becomes another buried part of her.
She ignores how well she remembers his hands on her skin and his breath on her bare shoulder blade when he held her close and how she felt so so alive.
That night happens.
The one where everything she thought she knew so well is destroyed. And suddenly her already muddled world is replaced with distorted images of what has been and what is now. It's unrecognizable and elusive, and she could not grasp hold of it, even if she tried.
She leaves the enormous hall when her breath has finally reentered her lungs, because she can't stand looking at Brian's body and she can't face the realization of what she has done and she needs to be near life. So she runs to the only place where's she been unmistakably alive, but when she gets there, that's ruined too.
There's blood on the carpet, shockingly bright against the pale white fibers.
And Jasmine.
And Valentina.
She looks around frantically for him, because after all this, not him too.
He's unconscious in the bathroom, surrounded by his own blood and she realizes that he's hurt and had been trying to bandage the wound when he passed out.
She splashes water onto his face and cradles his head in her lap and prays.
He survives and she survives and it seems like an ending.
But it's not. They still go on and she realizes that all of her hours spent trying to sort out his place in her life were wasted, since they were always going to end up here.
He brings her coffee one morning, seven or eight, or is it nine months later, and she asks him about their English assignment and he asks her out.
It's abrupt and surprising and seems far too shallow for the deep water they've been treading.
She shakes her head, but somehow "okay" slips out and then she's standing in a bowling alley wearing someone else's shoes and someone else's life.
He, of course, is an expert bowler.
It takes her a couple frames but she finally taps into her Mai senses and wins easily.
He drives her home and kisses her on her front porch and her heart speeds up so quickly that she almost can't breathe.
She must look strange because he pulls back and says her name softly.
"What are we doing?" she asks finally.
"I'm kissing you."
"But why?"
He shrugs and whispers, "Because you're it."
It's too much and it's too soon and she leaves him on her front porch without as much as a goodbye.
He's holding onto something. He has to, she knows that, but she's not sure she can be that something.
They still train together and go on missions together and he still protects her, but he doesn't try to kiss her again and she doesn't try to sleep with him again.
At this point, neither of them have much left and they can't screw up what they do have. She tells him this and he nods, so she thinks he understands.
They carry on.
She can't be his something, she knows this, and eventually he stops wanting her to be, as the days turn into weeks and the weeks melt into months and the months bleed into years.
She inhales sharply when she realizes that she has now been without Valentina and Jasmine longer than she had been with them.
He looks at her, concerned.
But she just shakes her head and finishes looking at her new student orientation materials.
College seems so small and insignificant in the grand, sweeping narrative of their lives, but she promised her mom she'd go and really, what else would she do? Wait around for someone to attack her again?
He's going with her and they pack her tiny car full of clothes and lamps and a mini fridge and drive away to the whatever-comes-next.
She's paid for a single room and his boxes are all mixed up with hers so they don't really bother unpacking any of his things in his room across the hall.
It's a small, insignificant decision, but that's how they stumble into living together. Into a situation that is awkward at first, but soon becomes natural, like that opaque home she had built for herself once, long ago.
Monday nights they get coffee and listen to live music at the campus coffeehouse and Thursday nights belong to NBC and Sundays, Sundays are taco night.
The night she comes home to him cooking over their smuggled-in hot plate and the sounds of Jose Gonzalez pouring out of the stereo, she realizes that they have a taco night. It doesn't mean anything, really, but it does.
It means she cancels plans with her friends to be home for this. To be home for him. It means she puts him first and that he's not just a habit she picked up like biting her nails or drinking lattes every morning; he's not a habit, he's a choice. A choice that she is making every day and suddenly, things are very very clear.
"What is it?" he says, smiling a small smile when he sees her staring at him.
"Nothing," she says, pulling herself out of her reverie. "I just love taco night."
"Good, because I made this homemade salsa . . ." he says, as he describes the meal and she commits every part of him to her memory.
They barely make it through the door.
He has a couple of broken ribs and her ankle is twisted and her eye is turning purple and they haven't been so soundly defeated in a long time.
Of the two of them, she's in better shape, so she deposits him on his bed, finds ice and wraps it in a towel and holds it against his ribs. He winces in pain but doesn't say anything.
He's looking right into her eyes and they've been through hell and back and he's still here with her.
Slowly, tentatively, he reaches up and touches her swollen eye.
"We're quite the pair," he says.
"Yeah," she says back. She leans a little closer and accidentally puts more pressure on his side. He screeches a bit. "Alek, I think we need to get you to a doctor."
"No, I'm good."
"You're not good."
He doesn't say anything for a moment.
"Okay, that's true. But we'll be alright."
"We always are," she states. She's very aware of the 'we' as she says it. How her tongue bends a certain way to form the word and how it feels a bit like muscle memory. But she doesn't usually use that word and how can you remember something you never really known?
She dies again but doesn't recognize it until she comes back to life and sees him kneeling over her with the most horrified look on his face.
He's saying her name over and over again and she struggles to sit up, sputtering, as her heart starts moving, pumping back and forth, back and forth, again and again.
He supports her back and she looks around and sees Zane lying near them, dead.
"Alek . . ." she starts, but he stops her.
"I had to. He killed you. He's taken everything from me, but I couldn't stop fighting him. I had to keep going," he says, refusing to meet her eyes.
She knows what she would see there: anger, resentment, hatred.
She doesn't count on seeing remorse. Or a deep, deep sadness, when he finally looks at her.
And she realizes that it's been years, but they are right back in that blood stained bathroom, her spoken prayers swirling around them, as their picturesque life lay shattered on the cold, tiled floor.
In a seemingly whole other world that is still hers, finals week comes and she's stressed. There's a new unknown threat to the Mai cell and her Economics professor hates her and those twenty page papers aren't going to write themselves. She's not sure how she thought she could balance everything, but he's there with coffee and loud music at three a.m. to help keep her awake and suggestive comments that annoy her and also keep her adrenaline pumping. He must know what he does to her, or otherwise he wouldn't be doing it.
"You know what you need?" he asks, one particularly late night when they are in their pajamas and a rerun on Everybody Loves Raymond is playing in the background as she edits her paper on Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century.
"Hmm?" she asks, not looking up from her screen.
"You need to relax. And I know just the person to help you do that."
"Let me guess. It's you," she says dryly.
"College girl gets an A," he responds.
"I'm not sleeping with you," she states.
He stops laughing then and in the silence, she looks up from her computer.
"Well you've made that perfectly clear."
"Alek, I—"
"Chloe, don't bother," he says.
She hates what is happening, so she closes her computer screen and walks over to where he is sitting on his bed.
"You don't know what you're saying," she says quietly, sitting opposite him, facing him. She can do that now, face him.
He shakes his head and this whole thing has gotten very serious, very quickly.
"No, you don't realize what you are asking of me," he says.
"I'm not asking anything of you," she claims.
His eyes narrow and he studies her for a moment. "I reupped last year," he says finally.
"Reupped?"
"Yes, reupped my duties. I had the opportunity to switch to a different Mai group back in England, but I didn't. I recommitted here."
Oh. "Why didn't you tell me?" she questions, gently.
He shrugs. "I'm a glutton for punishment?" he offers.
She pulls back when he says that. "Yes, guarding me must be a real punishment." She stands to leave, but he reaches out and lightly tugs on her arm to keep her there.
"You know I didn't mean it like that," he says and silence once again fills the space between them.
"You once kissed me because I was 'it,'" she says finally after the quiet becomes too unbearable.
"Yes," he says, looking away.
"What did you mean by that?"
He exhales. "You're it for me, Chloe. And you don't feel the same way. And you ask me to stay with you and be here like this with you and I do it, but it's . . . it's difficult."
She closes her eyes and he leans forward and presses his lips to her forehead and doesn't pull away right away.
"I don't know where I fit," she says, her eyes still shut, as he sits back. "I am supposed to be both human and Mai, both the Uniter and a college freshman, both a fighter and what, a lover? And yet I can't seem to place myself anywhere that feels right."
She finally opens her eyes and he's staring back at her and she says, "Except maybe here. In this tiny dorm room with your tennis shoes by the door and your life intertwined with every part of mine."
She gives a small shrug and says, "How does that even make sense?"
"How does any of it make sense?" he asks and he may be just as lost as she is, but she realizes that she'll never be walking into the darkness alone.
So she leans forward and kisses him and it's not an ending, but a prelude.
They barely make it through the door.
It's their first official date (bowling just doesn't count) and ever the gentleman, he's walked her home only to have her unlock the door and pull him close to her.
She trips over her pile of books and brings him down with her and they laugh. It feels good to laugh.
Their beds seem too far away so they stay on the floor, because this has been a long time coming and why wait, why waste any more time? His fingertips trace over her spine as he unzips her dress and she flips him over so that she is on top, because she likes control and she can't always give him his way. They've done this before, but it's different now, because they are different now.
And it means so much more.
"Morning," he says, leaning down to kiss her shoulder as he navigates around her in their small kitchen.
"Morning," she says. It's their college graduation day and her mom is flying in to see their apartment before the ceremony and it's supposed to be the brand new start to the rest of their lives.
But as she looks at him devouring a bowl of Fruity Pebbles (because at twenty-two she still can't get him to eat a grown-up cereal), she realizes that the rest of their lives started that horrible night that she can still barely think about.
And the evening she realized they had a taco night tradition.
And the early morning hours when she kissed him and the whole day they spent in bed on their anniversary and the time he took her to Italy for a surprise vacation and that moment when she realized that he is the rest of her life. The rest of her lives actually.
"We're going to be late picking up your mom," he says as he deposits his bowl in the sink.
She reaches up and straightens his tie, before leaning in to kiss him quickly.
He grabs the keys and says, "Ready?"
And she is.
Thanks for reading and reviewing. Love to all.