He says her name. Once. Like a bell ringing. Like a sigh.
It's a thousand different sparks somewhere else, fingers gentling against his neck, relaxing a fraction into the pause before he crashes into her, and she lets him. She's not even surprised. Maybe she'd even half wanted something like this a week ago when distorted dream logic and the blurriness of drugs and dysphoria, the continual patience to wait for his waking mind to remember it, made it all too easy to shave off some of the serial numbers on any kind of reunion. That she'd waited so long, and she'd go right on waiting if it was in her power to help keep him safe.
And all of them, so short, barely handfuls of minutes in each one. Maybe only until about now, when she'd had to send him back each time.
Maybe this is what she'd wanted that whole time, when the time, the world, the universe, and the darkness coming for everyone, always had to come first. The total length of him caught up in clutching her to his body and burying into hers simultaneously, all of his words pouring out against her skin. She hugged him back just as hard, momentarily stilled by the solid reality of him, of his voice not stopping, of having the moment to hang on, desperately to what had been so brutally ripped away for so long.
Jack's voice is a speed-laden litany of apologies she's not sure she ever needed and still wants to pull from the air and collect like fireflies in a jar. Trap the jar in her chest, and protect each one. Tuck them in with six years of reckless, desperate wishes—something so connected not even flesh could sever it—manifested completely differently, and still all but forgotten entirely.
"Hey, hey, shhh, shh—" Sabine says quietly, her face tucked up against what she can reach from the side of his face—mostly talking into his hair and part of his ear. Hand stroking his back. "That still doesn't sound a whole lot like breathing either."
Problematically, it also doesn't sound ... right.
All of it adds up. She knows the things he's talking about; she's pretty sure. But then, it doesn't continue. He's not saying anything about where he was or how they stopped. Everything he says has nothing to do with what they'd been doing last.
no subject
Like a bell ringing. Like a sigh.
It's a thousand different sparks somewhere else, fingers gentling against his neck, relaxing a fraction into the pause before he crashes into her, and she lets him. She's not even surprised. Maybe she'd even half wanted something like this a week ago when distorted dream logic and the blurriness of drugs and dysphoria, the continual patience to wait for his waking mind to remember it, made it all too easy to shave off some of the serial numbers on any kind of reunion. That she'd waited so long, and she'd go right on waiting if it was in her power to help keep him safe.
And all of them, so short, barely handfuls of minutes in each one.
Maybe only until about now, when she'd had to send him back each time.
Maybe this is what she'd wanted that whole time, when the time, the world, the universe, and the darkness coming for everyone, always had to come first. The total length of him caught up in clutching her to his body and burying into hers simultaneously, all of his words pouring out against her skin. She hugged him back just as hard, momentarily stilled by the solid reality of him, of his voice not stopping, of having the moment to hang on, desperately to what had been so brutally ripped away for so long.
Jack's voice is a speed-laden litany of apologies she's not sure she ever needed and still wants to pull from the air and collect like fireflies in a jar. Trap the jar in her chest, and protect each one. Tuck them in with six years of reckless, desperate wishes—something so connected not even flesh could sever it—manifested completely differently, and still all but forgotten entirely.
"Hey, hey, shhh, shh—" Sabine says quietly, her face tucked up against what she can reach from the side of his face—mostly talking into his hair and part of his ear. Hand stroking his back. "That still doesn't sound a whole lot like breathing either."
Problematically, it also doesn't sound ... right.
All of it adds up. She knows the things he's talking about; she's pretty sure. But then, it doesn't continue. He's not saying anything about where he was or how they stopped. Everything he says has nothing to do with what they'd been doing last.