He knows it's wrong. He knows he should end it, but he can't. He sees them look askance at him in the morning as he leaves her room, and he knows they're right, much as he hates to admit it.
But he also knows, come night, he'll be there again, wrapped up in her secret places, the ones he'd mapped desperately in dreams long before she let him in, before he'd ever thought to ask her.
She'll stand in the doorway like a dream, beckoning, her eyes shining like the midnight sun, and he'll know there's nothing in his daylight promises, his empty vows to leave her. She knows the ways of his heart as well as he, dark and sure of herself. She'll smile, the wicked curve of her full lips promising heaven, and he'll fall, the walls of his resolve tumbling.
He will drown in her dark eyes as his body merges with hers, leaving them both aching and desperate, never satisfied by the briefness of the moments they become one.
He thinks sometimes of leaving and never coming back. He thinks sometimes of dying, pouring his whole self into her, so they would never be apart.
When he finally shores up his strength and leaves, he learns that none of his one-night encounters can ease his body's desire for her, erase his heart's longing.
He'd once thought that she could save him with her tenderness, save him from the bitterness at his unknown past. He knows now that that was too much to expect from a young woman fighting her own personal demons, but he'd believed it, and she'd let him. She'd trapped him sure as any spider snares a fly, and he -- who'd always needed to be free -- went willingly.
He's learned much about himself since then, and most of it he doesn't like. He's learned more about her, as well, and knows now that he can never escape -- no matter where he sleeps or how far he runs, he will come back to her.
He'd never believed in fairy tales, knowing that the prettified versions told to children can't be the whole story, and his belief is borne out by their love. Because their love is not the happily ever after she'd expected, nor the salvation he'd desired. But the one thing he's learned, the one thing he now knows deep down to the marrow of his metal bones, is that he is hers, as much as she is his.
So while she is not the one who can save him from his haunted past or his painful present, she is the only one who makes him believe he can be saved, that there is more to life than the endless round of fighting and fucking which had filled his days before he'd met her.
And she is the only one who makes him want it.
~fin~
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Thanks to Jen, Pete, Dot, and Meg. Okay, this is another fic inspired by a song, but isn't really a songfic, per se. If you figure out what the song is, I'd be very impressed.