A/N: This popped into my head while I was stuck on another piece. It's not meant to be taken as a part of any particular canon.
Warning: This is a bit dark…
He remembers the first time it happened. Late one night when through the fog of sleep he caught the sound of the ramp lowering. He pulled himself out of bed and stumbled out to see who it was. He watched her trudge toward him: weary, wrung out, defeated.
"I'm tired," she whispered.
Later, he thinks his actions that night were the pinnacle of his life. Wrapping his arm around her shoulders and leading her to his cabin. Helping her into his bunk and climbing in after her. Curling his body loosely around hers and letting her sleep undisturbed; letting them both sleep.
She didn't say anything on that night or on the ones to come. He never thought the silence was oppressive; on the contrary, it was a relief, relief from all the words they exchanged during the days. And a relief from the days when he didn't see her, when he was gone or she was gone, and he exchanged words, too many words, with her in his head.
-000-
It doesn't happen as often as he'd like. She's busy, he's busy, sometimes she works overnight. He knows it is easier for her to fall asleep amidst of the distractions of the day; at night it is more difficult to get outside of her head.
Once a week, perhaps twice, she comes by late and he watches as she removes her boots or jacket or anything else she might have on over her clothes. Some nights it is too hot for clothes but she wears them anyway. He touches her only glancingly, determined to let her have this. It takes all his self-control to accomplish this, and he makes up for it the following day, alone.
-000-
The longer it goes on the more it seeps into their daytime interactions. Not directly, of course; there is never any mention of those nights. But he notices the occasional flash of emotion in her: of relief, or gratitude, or resentment, or a combination of all three. He thinks he might be mirroring those emotions back, though it is hard for him to tell. He has always tried to avoid descending too deep within himself, perhaps unsure whether or not he will like what he finds.
-000-
The first time it happens he isn't surprised. At that point in his life, it never occurs to him a woman could desire comfort from him in a non-sexual manner. Only later does he wonder if that is actually what she wanted most.
Like all the previous nights, they don't talk. She reaches for his shorts with a familiarity that presumes they have done this dozens of times. His fingers are clumsy at first, out of practice with the types of touches required. They move by instinct and there is no need for vocalization. He hears only her breaths, starting out long and dreamy and then shortening in cadence, until he is aware of nothing else except for her soft gasps, hot puffs against his neck.
When he comes that first time, it is all he can do to keep from crying out.
-000-
They carry on outside his cabin as if nothing has changed. She visits him at a frequency insufficient to what he would prefer. He thinks he can occasionally spot the same desperation clinging to her, evidence that she is as needy as he is. They are still quiet when they make love, at least most of the time. Words would ruin everything, he thinks; or maybe that is just an excuse.
And then the interactions between them shift again, and silence is no longer adequate. They try new things, daring things, things even he hasn't done before. Perhaps they are succumbing to a temptation to one-up each other, or else they dimly grasp an insecurity that is alleviated only by pressing ahead to new frontiers, never settling into a predictable pattern.
Instructions are necessary, now, whispered encouragement, verbal communication. Relax, he tells her, when she tenses around him. Breathe. Keep breathing, in and out. There you go.
Occasionally they go too far in these explorations and one of them ends up retreating as if burned. Words again are necessary to talk it out, discuss their limits, but those intimate discussions, vulnerable and heady, are not what stay with him. Instead, the silences in between, the minutes and hours when the harmony of their bodies are the only subjects in play: those are what he holds close.
-000-
They are happiest in the period right after the war when they are together in every way possible: privately, in their shared home, embarking on a life together; publicly, venturing out despite the media attention, laughing with old friends and new acquaintances. They and everyone else in the galaxy are swept up in the maelstrom of hope and optimism that has long been denied. Silence is banished; everything around them is noisy and exuberant and there is no opportunity for regrets or second thoughts.
Some nights they come back late, supporting each other as they stumble through the door. She whispers I love you and I want you and he knows this is the happiest he will ever be.
-000-
The years go on and they begin to fall back into their old patterns. He becomes restless and edgy, impatient with their settled life. She is drawn deeper into her work as the surrounding political structure shows sign of cracking. Separations start out short and then lengthen; soon they are spending more time apart than together. Each of them independently attempt to knit the fabric back into place, but there are too many distractions competing for their attention, too many threads that fall by the wayside.
When they are together they fight more and more frequently. The time he leaves and doesn't return somehow takes him by surprise; he has always assumed they would find a way to resolve their differences, that a miraculous solution would descend upon them and fix what was broken. After all, if they can't make it with each other, with whom can they make it? They have shared so much, the two of them, things no one else can understand.
They have no children to bind them together; their conflicting desires on that front never aligned long enough to become a reality. He is regretful, and then not, his thoughts on the subject still wishy-washy long after the possibility itself has died out.
-000-
Years pass in a tremulous stasis. The galaxy has changed and he no longer knows his place in it. He flails around, trying to capture the glory and purpose of the old days but after a while he slips back into his older habits, his older compatriots. Now he is perhaps just wise enough not to get in too deep like he did when he was starting out. He's careful, cautious, always has an escape plan.
He realizes he doesn't want to give her a reason to come after him.
-000-
His ship, the last tether to her, is gone. He catches rides on public transport, buys his passage onto freighters even shadier than the ones he's used to. At one point he falls in with a crew of beings, some friendly, others less so. Joining a crew allows him a modicum of structure in his life. He recognizes that, if presented at just the right time, how desirable and addictive that structure is to him. He tries not to stay with them for too long.
Years pile on top of each other and he doesn't stop thinking about her and him and what went wrong. Maybe they were doomed from the start; maybe there was never any hope. Maybe they are just two proud, difficult people who couldn't summon the grace to humble themselves for each other. He's seen it before, in other couples; he just didn't think it would happen to them.
-000-
He hears the news in a cheap motel. A terrorist attack at a summit on miners' rights. No survivors. How fitting, he can't help thinking. An apt prediction of her end, the noble martyr, an accusation he might have hurled at her during one of their long-ago fights.
He hasn't seen her in years, has in fact arranged his life so he was almost guaranteed not to accidentally run into her, but the new reality of her absence nearly undoes him. He drinks himself unconscious that night in his room only to drag himself out a day later and repeat the process. He wonders what her last thoughts were, if by some undeserved fortune they were of him.
The silence of her nonexistence weighs on him. He realizes how much he depended on those one-sided conversations he carried, conversations lovingly turned over and over in his head until they were polished smooth with care. The monologues took the edge off, even provided a small flame of hope that nourished him, although he never would have admitted to himself that he had actually hoped.
And now there is nothing: no future with him and her together, and no future of him alone holding her living presence within. That last absence, something he never expected, he finds to be the most cruel.
There is only silence.
-000-
Her brother tracks him down a few days later. They haven't communicated in years and he resists asking how he succeeded in locating him; it is a stupid question.
Her brother says a few words and gives him a few things, mementos she stored in her home or carried with her. A picture of the two of them kissing, faces flushed, captured when they were young. A torn flimsi on which he had scrawled a love poem, partly as a joke, partly not. A rock, worn and shiny on one side, coarse and sandpapery on the other. When they found it on a beach during one of their rare vacations, he had joked about it representing the two of them, disparate lives melded together.
You're too pretty to be the rough half, she had teased him.
He manages to thank her brother before he turns away.
-000-
He has no idea what to do with his future, a future that stretches dismayingly long. Drinking himself to oblivion loses its appeal after the first couple of attempts and he finds he doesn't have the stomach to try again.
Where there was once hope, there is now only memory. He wonders if memories alone can sustain him, not just memories of the two of them, but memories of his prior self and the way she inhabited that self for so long. As long as he has that recollection, faint though it may be, he thinks it might be worth it to continue.
And so life goes on in blithe obliviousness to his pain. Other beings have similar burdens, he thinks, don't they? It would be unfair for him to shoulder the universe's sorrows all on his own. Sometimes he envies her for not having to experience what he is experiencing; other times he manages to uncover a smidgen of gratitude for what he once had.
Late one night, in a home he has grown to call his own, he catches a holo-biography of her life. He is in it, of course, and he watches the moving pictures of the two of them, young and beautiful and brave, flying through the galaxy under the assumption that they owned it when in reality they didn't even own each other.
He sees it now, that no one ever truly belongs to anyone else. He once thought that she was his and he was hers. But all this time they were never really in control, he thinks, and it seems a distant miracle that their paths ever crossed.
He drifts off to sleep, sad and sentimental but somehow satisfied all the same. He sleeps, deep and dreamless, for longer than he has slept in a very long time.
And in the morning he wakes to silence.