"I would kiss you right now, if only you were here."
Darkness comes and he crosses his legs, ignores his aching limbs and curls his body into a tight ball, allowing himself to be caught up in memory.
He starts off slow, with the image of his daughter through time. Little hands in his, deep chuckles of laughter, his fingers knotting in her hair the first time he messed up her braids.
She morphs into his mother, hair that same tonal red he remembers from youth. Calling her mommy, calling her mom, and finally mother. Holding her hand and running to her where she waited for him at the school gates.
He trips down memory lane and clings to friendship and family and finds his way to love. Deep, penetrating love!
Beckett.
His eyes close.
Beckett and the call of her voice, the mad and frustrating, tantalizing and tease. The crushing weight of pain and the dizzying heights of passion.
Beckett and heat. Beckett and the soft brush of her fingers over his face. Beckett and every kiss they have ever shared.
Beckett. Always Beckett.
It lasts for hours, minutes, seconds. He has no way of knowing, time lost meaning the day he was taken and when memory no longer suffices he turns - as he has for so many years - to fantasy.
To make believe.
And for a little while she's there with him. For a little while she kisses him in the dark and makes the nightmares fade.
Sometimes it's soft and sweet.
Sometimes it's hard, rough, full of longing, rib crushing, and stealing their breath.
Sometimes it's everything their first kiss wasn't and sometimes it's a slowed down, captivating play by play that takes that one sacred moment and turns it into something mythical, unobtainable. Delirium setting in.
More often than not it's new and strange. It's a kiss that ghosts their lips together, eyes open and tentative, touch barely a thought. He breathes her in, her aroma swirling around him like a second skin, the fall of her hair hiding half her face.
He catches himself reaching for her, to curl the strands back behind her ear, to search her eyes desperately. He knows the weight of her gaze, the effort it takes to push worry and suspicion from the look she levels him with, he knows she'll question the touch of fingers that have missed her, have longed for and craved her. He knows the weight of all he is bringing down on them will leave their kiss burdened and heavy with things they had finally left behind.
She'll part her lips with a look that raises unspoken questions, not with the hungry yearning for the press of his own mouth, the deep, penetrating sweep of his tongue. She'll want answers he cannot give.
His lips to hers may leave them both hovering, both fearful, yet he needs it just the same. To be close to her again he'll endure whatever he has to, craving it all.
He swallows down the terror and the pain and clings to Beckett's ethereal presence as long as he can. Before they come for him again. Before he has to leave.
He clings to the smell of her skin, the dip of her forehead, eyes open and breath slow as she watches him. There will be concern in that mesmerising swirl of hazelnut and moss, there will be doubt, but there will still be love.
Please, god. There will still be love.
She will ask questions and he won't be able to answer them and the confusion will be a heavy price to pay.
He knows these things and more and yet, alone, he imagines getting to hold her again, to kiss her, and as darkness falls and puts another night between him and the woman he loves, he lets his eyes fall shut once more on the promise of their reunion kiss.
Whatever it may be.