Pillow Talk This Is Not

Here in your arms where the world is impossibly still
With a million dreams to fulfill
And a matter of moments until the dancing ends
Here in your arms when everything seems to be clear
Not a solitary thing would I fear
Except when this moment comes near the dancing's end

– Until, Sting

It wasn't surprising, and it was far from the first time. Thinking about rain or grass or the aberrant bone-cracking unnaturalness of familiar transformations. Thinking about wind and hunting, and then the mundane – cooking, cleaning – which were memories all the same, though from a different cellar. Thinking about everything, anything, trying to be somewhere else just for a few more minutes and not look into her eyes, not think about her here with him, just a few minutes more …

But it didn't work, and he wondered if it ever would again. Like too many times before, he was spent, gasping, his elbows shuddering him down to her while she ran her palms over his shoulders and whispered into his ear, "It's all right. It's not your fault."

But it didn't feel all right, because it was just another bite of sour proof that she was older and he was not, even if he felt older in every way but this. Too, too solid, eternally twenty-seven. It felt like failure. And he knew she knew he would have caused himself pain to deny it, maybe especially in this. Because she still felt, tasted, sounded like Tifa in the dark, and he didn't want to admit that it sometimes seemed like he was the one who was changing, going backwards.

"I'm sorry." The words didn't mean enough, but he couldn't say any more. Not at these fragile moments, when it felt like one word too loud might bring the future in to lay waste to the present, and the past. When he felt desiccated, empty and cold with sweat, and didn't want her to know because she might still be able to feel the way it used to be, and he couldn't have made himself ruin the illusion for her.

"I told you, it's all right. It doesn't matter. My body is slower now, that's all."

Eventually it would be slow enough that at any moment she could just stop. And he would be the one unable to catch up with her.

"Vincent?" Her hands had stilled on his shoulders and he could feel the prick of her fingernails. He could still remember nights, years past, when she had broken the skin and he had laughed at her apologies because the scars of her passion would be gone in a day. He had sort of thought she would always be able to make more. But now he wished some of the scars would have stayed, to mark him. To remind him in the future that he had belonged to her, once upon a time. That his flesh had been hers to crash against and rip to pieces.

He had been silent for too long, he knew suddenly, and she was uneasy. He pulled back a little to kiss her, and he could feel the unfinished tide of arousal in her lips and the small, restless twitches of her limbs. It was familiar territory, and in a moment the cords of cold fear began to relax again, retreat into the back of his mind under the undeniable reality of the softness of her mouth and the tension in the legs wrapped around his waist. "Then I suppose I'll have to slow down a little."

Though it never seemed to matter. Slow, slower, slowest, his body still betrayed him. A twenty-seven year old libido, and sometimes it was a month between the nights she responded to his advances. So that by the time she was returning those feather-kisses, her fingers already knowing what he would feel all the way to the soles of his feet, he was too willing, too ready, too impatient as much as he tried to hide it or hold himself back.

The chemistry was no longer exactly right. There was no longer a fail-safe battle plan he could rely on to be successful. He was perceptibly losing control, sand through his fingers. If he had ever had any control over the merciless way time marched on.

Change felt like acquiescence. But in this case it was the only option left. And he couldn't pretend anymore that he couldn't see the gaping holes in the illusion.

She opened to his kisses, to his touch, and it was joy and pain to hear her moan and sigh, and not be right there with her.

She curled up into his arms afterward and kissed his throat, like nothing was different from any other time. And it was a little bit of relief. "I love you," she breathed into his skin and burrowed further into him, under the blankets.

There was an uncomfortable lump in his throat, and he almost grimaced as he swallowed, knowing she would notice. "I love you, too."

The sweep of her hands was abruptly heavier, rubbing into his muscles as if she was trying soothe some physical discomfort. And he was instantly, ashamedly aware of the fact that the bridge of his nose was stinging. Only in his dreams had he ever cried over the future, where he couldn't seem to control the waves of misery and empty darkness.

"Vincent?"

He took a breath, determined to steady his voice. "Hm?"

"It bothers you, doesn't it?"

He almost asked her what she was talking about. But the rational part of him, established even below the fear, knew he couldn't do that to her. There were things that had to be talked about, before they turned into chasms too wide to re-cross, and it took courage to bring them out into the open where they might snarl everything up. "It doesn't bother me."

"It isn't the same anymore, though. Sometimes I'm so tired when I get home, all I want to do is sleep." She pressed her mouth against the side of his jaw, as if he might simply take it as a kiss. "I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize." He was adamant about this. She was never to blame herself. He drew her a little closer, wanting to smother her feelings of culpability away. "Don't ever apologize. It doesn't bother me." He tried to smile, and pressed his mouth to her forehead so she could feel the gesture. "Believe it or not, I didn't get into this for the sex."

She was too still, too quiet to be brushing the conversation away with a smile or a chuckle for what really wasn't very funny. Finally, she whispered, "Sometimes it actually seemed like time was standing still." She had been cutting her hair, shorter and shorter, to make it easier to take care of. But it was the same clean, healthy smell as he buried his mouth and nose in it. It was always the details that didn't change. "Sometimes it still does, when I look at you. Sometimes I forget that I've gotten older at all."

"You haven't aged to me." It was the details that reminded him. The gestures, the expressions, the laugh, the everyday things like the way she turned on the radio to dust the house, the way she kicked her way into her cardio shoes. Her eyes, too, he realized. Her eyes would always be the same when everything else about her had changed. "You're still the Tifa I wanted from the beginning."

"You don't feel like that Tifa is slipping away?" Her voice was muffled and soft, hardly more than a breath against his skin.

The stinging sensation was working its way to the end of his nose. He closed his eyes, trying to scrape together the wall she knew too well how to bypass. "I can't help but remember that you're slipping away. But it doesn't change my feelings." He swallowed again, reflexively, and cursed himself. He just wanted to forget once more, to hold her without thinking about a time when she would forever be at least six feet away from him, separated by earth and heaven and hell. "I'm always going to love you."

"I'm always going to love you, too."

Her fingernails were suddenly sharp against his skin, gripping him painfully as if she was afraid of him disappearing. And his lungs burned for the air necessary for what he feared might end up being a choked exhale, knowing the marks would be gone in a day.

"Vincent … " And there were tears she was unashamed to shed in her voice. "You have to promise that you'll find someone else."

But he couldn't speak under the force it took to keep his jaw from trembling. Though the tears still came, and the heat of them surprised him. It had been a long time.

"You have to promise. I can't stand the thought of you living alone." She moved and her hands were on his neck, in his hair in the dark, and he saw the moment in her expression when her fingers encountered the warm moisture on his face. "Oh … oh, Vincent … " He doubted she realized that she was pulling his hair. "Don't believe it's going to be the end. You're going to have so much time … "

Oh yes, there was going to be so much time. And he knew for one searing split-second that there was no way he could bear this by himself any longer. "It's going to break me, Tifa. There won't be anyone else."

"No, no, don't say that." Her hands were like a punishment for a moment before she seemed to realize that she might be hurting him and she relaxed her grip. But the hard resolve in her eyes was almost worse, and he abruptly remembered why he had always kept the burden to himself. "Maybe there's a way we can distance ourselves before the end, so it's not so hard … "

"No, Tifa."

"But, by then … "

"No." He felt stifled, barely audible, and needed to shrug away from the reality, the pain, the tragedy he shouldn't have loosed to her. "I'm taking every second with me."

She seemed ready to argue against the judgment behind his choice, and he steeled himself for the inevitable agony of sifting through hopes and solutions he had long ago discarded. But then, as if the darkness might have let her see the truth, the stiffness began to drain out of her body.

Silently, somewhere between soft apology and careful comfort, she curled up beneath his chin and held him for a wound beneath his skin that would never heal. And he deftly covered the wound again, because he couldn't continue living a sane life with it out in the open.

"Tifa."

"Yes?" Voice small and soft.

He knew she might not accept it easily, when all her nature told her to do was find a way to fix it. "We need to put this conversation behind us." He could feel her hands turning into fists and quickly continued explaining. "I can't think about the future everyday. You need to wake up tomorrow and continue as if time is standing still. There's no answer I can live with but that one."

He should never have burdened her with it, he knew now. He should have lied and let her believe whatever she wanted. Yes, he would find someone else. Yes, he would be fine when she was gone. No worries, Tifa, I'll be whistling a tune a week after you're dead.

Though she might not have believed him, not entirely. Even a hundred conversations might not have convinced her. And he could never have withstood a hundred conversations.

Her arms tightened around him and there was warmth on his throat, unmistakable for anything but what it was. "I can do that," she told him thickly.

And her wordless pity wasn't so bad for right now, he decided after a moment, when she was holding him like this and they were floating together in the same fading universe. He was sure he would remember this moment, in years and years to come, when he felt alone and misunderstood in a world that would constantly be leaving him behind. Tifa had looked into his fear, into her future, had known the full extent of what she was going to have to do, and what she was going to put him through.

And had held on anyway.

It wasn't surprising, maybe, when the early morning hours brought him a nightmare. Stumbling along, alone and searching through a crumbling house he vaguely recognized as their own, except it had too many doors and all of the lights were broken.

But Tifa woke him up to wrap herself back up in his arms. And he didn't dream again.