I really should be studying but I can't be bothered and I haven't written anything in ages so there I am. Plus, I just had to write a Rush fic after the last few episodes of season 4 because my favourite couple will now never be :( I'm in a bit of a fix-it fic mood so I have a few ideas about Rush stories.

Disclaimer: Own nothing expect this storyline.

She remembered when she had been four years old and the thunder rolled like a booming drum outside her small suburban house. Her brothers would 'whoooo' like ghosts outside the peep of her door, and she didn't mean to but she would cry out for her mother, clutching the pink flower sheets over her head. Sometimes she'd run from her room and crawl into her parents' bed, while her brothers would race back to their own pretending they had been there the entire time.

By the time she was ten she pretended she was no longer scared of the thunder rolling outside. Her brothers teased they would tell her friends at school that she was a scaredy-cat. So she would roll herself up in her white sheets (she had demanded they no longer be pink), closed her eyes and prayed for the sunshine of the morning.

At sixteen when her boyfriend had broken up with her by email and told his friends all about it, she had cried herself to sleep with the sheets wrapped around her like warm arms. But not because she loved him (if anything she felt relief). She cried because she found herself attracted to his new girlfriend more then she ever was to him. This was her comfort, no mother arms for Stella, she was too independent for that.

At twenty six being between the sheets still gave her comfort. It was there that the world crumpled away. Sometimes the sheets felt like the tent of her latent thoughts, where the deepest, inner workings of her desires, hopes and dreams came to the fore. The outside world seemed less real at moments like this, when he was here.

The room was darkness. Stella guessed it was three in the morning, maybe four. But she could still see the smaller details of his face. She pressed herself closer into his body and his warmth eloped her as he shifted towards her. She didn't hesitate as she gently traced the curve of his cheek, down to his chin and stopping at the edge of his lips.

It was a ghost's touch, rather a stupid poetic thought for her, but there was no other way to describe it. He'd never even know she had done that. Or did he? Did he know that she watched him after he had fallen asleep; studying him so she remembered tiny details when she distanced herself, just to show that she had the power between them? Did he know what she thought in their little haven at three in the morning? Maybe. It could explain why his eyes still followed her with a softness that frightened her. It was too close, too intimate. It had started out as only being a bit of fun.

It was only in moments like this she acknowledged silently that she had come to rely on him. The pink, white and blue sheets from her childhood had become a solid body that she would fold herself into and become lost in for a few hours, his name coming as a gasp from her lips over and over. He had pressed a gentle kiss to her temple, his lips lingered for a second longer then usual (her eyes had closed at the bubbling feeling inside her when he had done that). It was something she would never have allowed before.

They created their own world between the sheets, a single world where she didn't stop the softness in his eyes for those few hours. Maybe that was what let him know that she needed him more then she had ever needed anybody. But she would never admit it to him.

She leaned forward, carefully so she wouldn't wake him, and pressed a gentle kiss to the edge of his mouth. Then she turned and backed away as far as the bed would allow and closed her eyes.

The next morning when he had said she'd "gave more" she couldn't help the twitch at the corner of her mouth. Maybe this was a sign that their little world between the sheets was invading the day? She truthfully didn't know. But that didn't stop the fear, along with a molecule of content, from coming to the surface from that dark clove somewhere deep inside her.

But instead she'd shaken her head, wished him luck with 'Little Michael' if Audrey waved a pair of scissors in his face, and walked away. Because she would never admit it to him. Never.

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