A/N: Quick fic to celebrate holiday break! Poem title taken from Pablo Neruda: "Maybe January light will consume/My heart with its cruel/ray, stealing my key to true calm." Evidently, the ominous foreshadowing wasn't blatant enough for me and I couldn't leave well enough alone with the title because I am a bad, bad person.

Disclaimer: nope.


Fionna's eyes are the bluest things he's ever seen; cornflower blue flecked with little chips of green like the flowers that Gumball grew in his greenhouse, fragile little exotic things with thin, glossy petals that curled at the slightest touch.

Marshall had never seen blue eyes before Fionna. Living in the Nightosphere, everyone had had yellow or black eyes, or had long gone blind from the near total darkness, pupils milky like cave animals. The rare ones had eyes as red as his: deep and ominous, slit-pupilled animal eyes. Eyes that were dangerous, that weren't meant for seeing and admiring but for searching and hurting, meant for darkness.

Those eyes were all the more beautiful like this, haloed in the afternoon sun and the sudden influx of light as Fionna opens her door and squints outside, eyes crinkling funnily, one hand reaching up to her forehead to shield her brow, wrist turned outward to show the soft, unbroken skin of her forearm. It takes her a moment to make him out from underneath his umbrella, the only spot of darkness in the entire sunlit vista.

Recognition flits across her face and she breaks out in a smile as he floats his way forward, feeling an answering smile stretch across his face.

"What're you doing around here, Marshall Lee?" When Fionna smiles, she smiles with all of her body. Marshall can see the tips of two little white eyeteeth at the corner of her mouth, and he knows it was worth it- stupidly risking life and limb to sojourn out into the day just so he could see those blue eyes.

"Hey, can't a guy come visiting his buddy? Though, I'm not a guy I'm a,"

"Vampire. I know, jeez. You've told me like a kajillion mathing times."

He favors her with a smirk as he steps through the doorway and into the house and the relative shade, finally lets himself relax a little bit now that he doesn't have sunlight crawling along his back, reaching greedily under his jacket, trying to get at his skin. "I don't think you know, or else you would have run screaming like you oughta have the first time."

One hand still on the doorway, she turns around and favors him with a look, suddenly serious. "No, seriously. Why are you here?"

She wasn't wearing her hat, for once, he realizes vaguely, her hair pulled together in a messy bun, the thin strands of hair at her temple sticking upwards with static, like the princess's golden thread begged for with the blood of her child, all the more precious for what was given up in gaining it. Because, he considers saying, Because I'm selfish. Because I want to see you while I still can. Because you're finite, and I'm not. Instead, he leers at her, asks, "why? You want me to leave? Got something to do? Got Gumball tied up in your bedroom-"

For how small she is, how tiny her hands are, she still punches hard enough to hurt, and he rubs his arm as a blush spreads across her cheeks and down her neck.

"Honestly," she huffs, "I don't know why I bother with you." She turns her back to flounce down the hall, and he follows, and it was enough for now.