Brush
5-sentence fic for a one-word prompt (in this case, the title) and a character or pairing (guess who?). I have no idea when this takes place – or perhaps I have too many ideas. Interpret as you will? I deliberately avoided using the prompt word in the ficlet itself.
They have never been given to gentleness; from the first what has been between them is too hot, too vital to be constrained, has found its expression in flares of passion (for better or for worse) as they each seek the answering core of fire in the other. They cut, bruise, bleed, bite – they demand and refuse to give, refuse to yield, and she wonders later if it was because they had always known how fragile forever is and simply blinded themselves to the truth: that passion is easier than perseverance, and that they have never learned how else to be.
(There had been moments of gentleness once, but they had always felt to her unreal, some sort of waking dream she could not quite bring herself to believe in, because the only reality she has ever lived is that such moments do not last and always come with a cost, and this will cost too much of what she has become, and without that person she does not know how she will survive.)
In the dimness his fingers skim against hers, his breath ghosts over her cheek and stirs her hair and her heart, and she turns her face away so he cannot see how so delicate a touch threatens to undo her. They are only shadows of the people they once were, drawn together in liminal spaces heavy with unvoiced regrets where past and present and future melt away, and this featherlight contact is the only apology she can give him.