DISCLAIMER: I own nothing.
A/N: this is just a tiny, unplanned piece of B/G that came from absolutely nowhere!
In The Shadows
by Joodiff
There is nothing different about the morning. Same colleagues, same utilitarian squad room, same evidence board. There is so very much different about it. But nothing that can be said aloud, here and now. She sits and she watches, and she says remarkably little, until even he gives her a bemused, quizzical look that says more and less than it should. Spencer asks a question, and he, he of the broad shoulders and the slim, narrow hips, turns away to answer. She stares at the place at the base of his skull where her fingertips roamed gently through his thick silver hair, seeking and finding the sensitive spot that made him startle at the unexpected shivers the light caress called forth. Nothing is different. Everything is different.
They talk of death and putrefaction, her colleagues. Drink coffee, lean back in their seats and ponder all the hows and whys of brutal murder. He leads, he guides; he draws facts and thoughts and theories from them with practised efficiency and surprising delicacy. This is where his ability, his experience really shows. It is not the only place. She has learnt that. Learnt it in shadows and secrecy, in a softer, gentler growl than she ever thought him capable of. He looks round at her again, still curious, but silent, not posing the one rough, irritable question that could threaten her equanimity – and his. Perfect mouth, not set sullen today; straight, no hint of a sneer or a challenge. He knows, too. That everything is different. That nothing is different.
Sober grey suit, impeccably tailored. Hides so much but – of course – quite deliberately shows off those wide, powerful shoulders strikingly well. Muscle and bone; soft places, hard places, secret places, all hidden away. She paints vibrant pictures in her head; remembers it all with pulse-quickening clarity. Started the wrong way, ended the right way. Stumbled into the forbidden arena in an unwary moment, and abruptly, impudently, exulted in it.
There's a proprietorial mark on his neck, just – oh, but only just – hidden by the collar of his pale shirt. Her mark. The slightest of bruises that will fade so very quickly to nothing at all, but will always be visible there in her memory… and in his. Her claim, her mark, impulsively set there forever in the impetuous swell of heat and desire. Nothing, everything. Its better-hidden counterpart burns deep into her skin like a brand as she stares at the vulnerable hollow beneath his Adam's apple and recollects the astonishing warmth and softness her hungry lips found there.
Steven Fletcher is long-dead. His broken skull grins whitely at them all from the evidence board, forever captured in glossy ten-by-eight. This is what they do, down in the basement; day after day, week after week. Year after year. They take accusatory ghosts gently by the hand and work tirelessly to give the cold, forgotten dead a voice.
He presides. Always, he presides. Quick and clever, he presides; sharp dark eyes always darting, looking this way and that, restlessly searching for answers. Now she knows what it is to drown in the fathomless depths of those eyes. Now, she knows. It's enough. It's not enough. Across the neutral space between them, the primitive heat of his body calls her; tempting, promising. And he watches from the other side of the invisible boundary. Watches her watching him.
This is the morning after the night before. And nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
He says, "Grace…?"
She starts to speak at last, but it isn't love that she speaks of. Not of love and not of lust, but of death and murder.
Here, in the bright artificial light, nothing has changed.
But later, in the stealthy shadows where everything has changed, they will both speak again of love and lust.
- the end -
