Pairing: Jack/Gwen
Rating: PG (K+)
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Her fierce grace marked time, but she was slipping through his fingers.
At the conference table she looked so impermanent. A flick of her hand shuttled hair (the color of fertile earth) from her face, revealing her examination of the charts before her. He imagined that keratin a plain for growing thoughts, her beautiful soul directed by the fragile, human organ beneath. He followed her lashes, like swipes of a hummingbird's wings. He could almost feel her heartbeat thumping through the floor.
The kohl around her eyes was magnetic. She herself was magnetic, drawing him into her across time and space. The more time he spent in her company, the stronger her gravitation became. This attraction was difficult - relationships in general were difficult. Of course he felt an intimacy with his coven here, under the close-lipped cobblestones. Sometimes though, even they asked too much. He traipsed through time, cutting more unmade, hypothetical ties than he forged. But there she sat, sucking him in effortlessly like a neutron star just appeared in the haze of eons.
An angry, hot spike shot through his chest as he caught the glimmer on her hand. Of course, it did nothing to disrupt the soft, natural cadence inside his ribcage. Nothing had for so long, yet she added an occasional flutter. He was not the type of man to which the linear model of time applied; it was a battle to find any type of chronology. But here life had begun to have an order.
She looked up and he was a helpless bird flying into a windowpane. His world narrowed to her countenance. She blinked, unknowing, behind the glass in a pantomime. The gravity drawing him in would collapse and become super-heavy as soon as tone brushed past her lips.
She would have waited. At the very least paused. At the same time it could never have been anything other than this now. Causality wasn't difficult to change in theory, yet some events were stickier than others. He was aerodynamic, sliding through the skies of time, slicing through the clouds of history. She was bulky, a creature barely suited for flight. And try as he might he could not keep her from slipping through his grasp. His hold was tenuous even by temporal standards, but the second his fingers would falter and let her loose was coming. He could smell it in the sea air like sailors could smell a storm.