A.N.: Just a little drabble while I edit a massive WIP I'm working on. :) Note: I just realized that I forgot to mark this as Complete. It's actually just a one-shot; I'd love to extend it, but it's unlikely any time in the foreseeable future.
He hates her; the knowledge of it has been fast around her neck now for some time. It's the way they move in space — he leaves any room she enters, starts eating only after she finishes, keeps a cautious buffer around her that even in her days of no control would have seemed excessive. It's his macro and micro expressions — a stern line across his brow when he spots her, an angry narrowing around his eyes. It's the fact that they're never on a mission together, and the one time they were assigned she heard his voice booming in the professor's office before she was even in her room. It embarrassed her until she remembered he could hear her well enough to know she would have heard him; then it made her angry, and when the assignments changed, she was glad.
Before the swap — that was what they called it, the swap, beginning with the day the professor held a meeting that only one faculty member was not invited to, and explained that time travel was indeed possible — the space between them was neutral, never charged. She had the obligatory crush on him; they all did, fixated on his long fingers and the scruff of his beard and the smell of his leather jacket. She ran into him at a bar once and was offered a drink and a ride on the back of his bike, both of which she accepted and understood for what they were: a ticket to the turnstile of his bedroom, for one-time access only. But she refused the third, unspoken offer and found her own bed instead; tension in the workplace did not seem worth even the touch of those long fingers, not when she had so little to do with this man.
Now she misses that careless neutrality — because this, this is awkward. Somehow it bothers her now, seeing him flirt with Jean, wondering if he sleeps with Storm, forcing herself not to be aware of the nights he doesn't come home, because his hatred chafes at her neck when he moves clear of her. She asks Bobby, who laughs; she asks Jubilee, who wonders. Maybe in that other past he lived, he hated her counterpart; this much, they can agree on. Maybe she did him harm. Maybe she broke his heart, Jubes suggests with a giggle. The only response is an annoyed wave and a skipped heartbeat.
She hurts herself not on a mission, but outside on the steps. Ice and gravity, it turns out, are a dangerous cocktail. When her legs give way underneath she's vaguely aware of his presence — that drift of tobacco, thick in the air — before the back of her head explodes in pain. There's no telling how long she's out, but she suspects it's not even seconds. His gift is generous, a remarkable sensation she has never experienced: flesh knitting itself together, a massage from the inside out.
The healing floods her body, but it's his mind that threatens to drown her. She's touched her loved ones, she's felt loved and cared for and even wanted. This is different. This is wild and restless and edged with darkness and has no name that she's learned. When she comes to he's whispering, soft and husky, a voice she didn't know he had. He calls her baby and says things she feels the need to pretend not to have heard. And when she opens her eyes, his aren't narrowed. There is no line on his forehead. His hand moves from her cheek to her hair when he notices she's back, his knuckles tracing down the white strands before he clears his throat and offers her a hand to stand up. Then it's over, and he's gone. Her hand goes to her neck, to the new feeling there.
Things are more awkward after that.