Lots of oneshots floating in my mind lately; figured I might as well have a place to put them.
Where Lovers Live: quick poetic sketch of Sasuke and Sakura.
Shades of Konoha: Onyx and Jade
Where Lovers Live
Lovers live in the ends of their fingertips
Bonds are built from the molecular level up, one neurotransmission a time, and forged by the tentative first touches when the impossibly shallow ridges of fingerprints trail over the millions of tiny creases in the skin, numbering each follicle and freckle and edge and plane and curve.
The body is mapped and traced and memorized and archived as fingers again and again follow the paths guided by a compass buried somewhere subcutaneously and attuned to the magnetic north of the lover's primordial self.
These explorations are cataloged in a dermal archive as the lover's journey winds down new and familiar routes – correcting the course and adapting as time weathers and sharpens and alters the terrain.
The paths are carved into the skin, and both lovers know them well, and can trace them like a scattering of iron shavings aligning to the electromagnetic bands of a charged piece of metal.
Lovers live in the ether between them.
They follow their own migratory pattern to return to one another, to seek out the other's hand and wind fingers in a familiar completion of part to whole.
They charge the air between their skin and transmit complex messages in that second before contact
Lovers fill the spaces and gaps left between fingers and sighs and heartbeats and knuckles and thighs.
He has been told that when lovers change partners, they first try to follow the topographical map memorized in previous explorations of a different terra firma, learning where the map is different and what routes are open, welcomed or forbidden and eventually new paths are learned and memorized and forged and recorded.
He can't comment on that – he has only had one lover, and she was the only one long before his lips brushed against hers for the first time,
before he touched that sacred spot on her forehead,
before he finally bared his naked and battered and fractured soul in an apology,
before he caught her against him, saved from the void by her sheer will,
before he watched with masked pride as she obliterated the very earth in battle,
before the warmth and pressure of her slight body lingered in his arms long after he placed her on the bench that fateful night in Konoha,
before he felt her hair brush over his fingers as he laid her somewhere in safety before chasing after the sand demon,
before her arms banded around him to chase the cursed black marks from his skin,
before she held him to her, bone-achingly relieved but still shaking from the fear that he died in a hail of ice and senbon.
It was always her.
She lived in the small spaces in his skin even when he tried to forget everything and everyone.
Her face still haunted the edges of his mental periphery just as her name was hidden in the texture of his tongue even when it remained unspoken as he trained in the den of snakes and darkness.
She was always just beyond that space just beyond his fingers.
But now, she is warm and pliant and there is no space between them.
She fills the every empty – the ridges in his fingers, the gap in his arms, the vast nothing of a once-wretched heart, the silence in his days, and the space between the mattress and the press of his body.
He traces the curve of her cheek, the arc of her back, the planes of her stomach and the valley between her breasts.
He travels now familiar routes that make her pulse race, her face flush, her eyes smolder, and her body arch against his and cry out his name.
He fills her as she fills him, and he is whole.
He holds his entire world close to him in sleep, and breathes her in. She is under his palms and in his skin, sharing his breath, and his warmth.
She is never far from him, even when he has to be far from her.
Even though he is never more at home than when her hand is in hers, he knows.
Lovers live in the ends of their fingertips.
And she is always at the end of his.
As he is always at the end of hers.
And no amount of distance or time or even death can ever come between them again.
Thanks for reading!
- GL