Written for a friend over on tumblr.
Some days, he was afraid to touch her.
There was something to be said for Colette that was easy to miss for those who didn't know. She was a child at heart, weak in the knees when she swayed to music and light on her feet like a breeze when she danced. He always spun her around, not once, but twice, because he liked to hear her laugh. It was warm, loud when she clutched her sides from the ache, and the mornings when he woke and found her sleeping contentedly on her side of the bed, hair spread out around her like a halo, she really did look like an angel, and Zelos had to wonder what he was doing with someone like her.
She was too good for him. But it was Lloyd who'd passed her by. Too caught up in his own adventures, too caught up in the world, she'd followed after and got lost in the gale he'd made. Zelos could see it, he saw Lloyd's intentions from the start, but he hadn't expected determination to outrank those that he cared about. Sometimes, things happened, or sometimes, like now, luck just liked to swing his way. But it wasn't luck for Colette; it was hurt, however unintentional, and now he was stuck picking up the pieces.
It wasn't to say Zelos was unhappy – no way, hell no – but there was something missing, as if, there was something that had slipped past his notice unidentified, a quiet disturbance centered around her tiny angel body and sunshine gold hair that he couldn't find no matter how hard he looked. Even when her eyes opened, the sun warm on her face and and a little too warm on his back, she looked happy. The kind of happy that indicates a person's well being, a pleasant glow with cheeks and lips tinted pink. She was alive, and now, meeting his eyes across the sheets, closing that space between them with a small calloused hand from working in the garden and helping him with the house, ever complacent and cheerful, she was awake, and suddenly, so was he.
He stretched like a cat, brushed his bangs out of his eyes before collapsing on his stomach and rolling over to cuddle her. Colette's laugh was soft, the drowsy kind that's feel good medicine and promising days, and Zelos soaked it up. He wouldn't ever drain her of her happiness, or ever take that away. He'd make sure she kept that defining smile, that glint in her eye when there was something that had particularly pleased her or terrified her to tears. But the tears would never come, at least, for as long as held her and ignored the shadows that were looming, everything was alright.
For now, the morning's were theirs to keep.
At least, he wouldn't get out of bed until she did. And if that meant sitting out on the patio for breakfast, her legs sprawled across his lap on the porch swing, her laugh loud when he tickled her feet and he had to struggle to keep his breakfast from leaping across the deck, than he'd take it. He'd take that day by day, those moments that stretched on in between the now and then, the elation that kept them both from darker days and even darker secrets, their own intercessions on life.
Zelos would take it. Because remarkably, by some twist of fate that he didn't believe in, some pulled string or divine intervention, she wanted him, too. She had told him so, when she'd visited him at his sister's, something there on her face that wasn't quite something but was really, really there, a disturbance that said something was on her mind that brought her ill at ease—she'd told him, smiling a child's smiled, her angel smile, her brave smile, the one she only gave to him when there was something serious to be told, she'd told him like a secret, had him lean down so she could whisper in his ear.
It was so Colette, so ridiculously her, that when she drew back, a tentative and unsure smile on her face when he was still, unlike the confidence she'd had only moments before she'd taken that one step too far, Zelos' face had cracked, and suddenly, there was no fear or notion that this was something they couldn't have, that he wasn't betraying Lloyd when he'd left her first. No, she made it okay, like she made everything okay, and when his lips lighted on hers in all the brevity he dared offer, her hair unsurprisingly soft and warm and thick and welcoming against the rough skin of his palm, it had been just right.
Colette had smiled. A little relief, a little fear gone.
Looking now at the girl drifting off, the soft skin and freckles in places only he knew of, there was no insecurities or doubts to found. There was a quiet beauty in the breakdown of their chances—and Zelos knew, undoubtedly, this was the Colette he'd wanted to keep. That it was she who'd brought them to this, this reality that was for more surreal than it should have been except when it wasn't, and honestly, Zelos thought, running fingers over the soft curves of her back, up and down her arms, the bridge of her nose, honestly, where else was she to go?
And for all the selfishness he'd ever felt, he was still selfish, because at least if she was here, here where he wanted her, that meant she was selfish, too. Colette knew what she wanted, and now, grown up, she was hardly innocent, but somehow, still just right, and somehow, still the child he'd always known, tucked into him and soft and made of sunshine and the things that young women shouldn't be made of, all his, and he, hers.
And for now, more or less, until she changed her mind, that would forever be enough.