He's lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, when she slips into the room. Quiet as the color red, the change in weather, the soulless eyes of empty windows. It's not until she's crawled silently into bed beside him that his gaze flicks sideways; he doesn't shift to make room for her, but instead remains still as she curls her body around his.

Head on his chest, fingers spread over his heart, she lifts her eyes to meet his. "Can I ask you something?" When he only grunts in response, she remains silent. Wraps her legs around his, his flesh cool against the embers burning along her skin. "Seriously," she prods, forever childlike. When the response is still little more than a grunted syllable, she twists her body so that she's straddling him. Leans forward to place a gentle kiss on his lips. "I've a question."

He melts a bit under the force of her charm, his hands moving to rest on her hips. She's so tiny and slight beneath his fingertips, bones as hollow as a hummingbird's. "Alright, love. Shoot, then."

She hesitates, as she always does, fighting love's paralysis. She could just let the question remain, unanswered, in what little space there is between them; could pretend she's changed her mind, and resume her comfortable silence beside him. But now that she's found the words, pretending to have lost them holds little appeal. Silence only ever crippled her, and she's grown tired of surrendering bits of herself to the chopping block. "If the idea of us is so illogical, if it's so ridiculous to you. Why're you holding out at all?"

The hands on her hips still; she doesn't often have the power to surprise him anymore, but when she does, it stuns him into stillness and silence. "Same reason you are, I'd assume." A non-answer, if ever there was one.

She laughs. She can't help it - it's not funny, really. But then again. It is, a bit. "No. Not for the same reasons I am. The illogic never even occurs to me."

"Not once?" He searches her eyes for a lie; finds none. She's like a kitten - all charm and no inhibitions. Whatever tendency she has towards aversion, lying never occurs to her. "In all this time, not once?"

Her heavy sigh is answer enough. When she rolls over onto her back beside him, the loss of her bodyheat weighs more than her slender frame straddling his hips. "Only when you remind me that it should occur to me." She pokes him in the side, forcefully enough to punctate her next few words. "I know I love you. Logic has no place in that."

"Right." Skepticism, if not bitter cynicism, comes as naturally to him as easy optimism is to her. "Because... love is all you need?"

Her answering silence reminds him that brevity, as easy a defense as it is, only ever hurts her. "But illogical doesn't mean it's impossible," he hurries to offer as consolation, anticipating her moods as well as he would his own. "Just means that it's illogical." Tries to inject the right amount of concern into his voice, but really doesn't see the problem. Their being together makes very little genuine sense; that's a fact, not pessimism on his account. The impausibility is undeniable.

When she still doesn't answer, he finally turns his head to look at her. Her silence makes him defensive - he'll not tolerate the cold shoulder when he's done nothing to deserve it. "Why're you sticking around, then?"

 "Because I love you, jackass." She sits up and hurls a pillow at his head - he reacts by calmly setting his glasses right, and sitting up to move the other pillows out of her reach. A preventative measure, one he should have known he wouldn't need. Her fits of temper pass like summer storms - she's never held onto a mood for longer than it takes to charm her out of it.

Before he's gotten the pillows properly out of his way, she's crawled into his arms again. Body tucked comfortably around his, she brings her lips up against his ear. Despite the violence of merely ten seconds before, she's docile as anything now, hushed and somber. She wants contact, and so does he; the loneliness of intimacy dissipates in a deliberate, directed haze. "I love you," she repeats, more quietly this time. "It's all the logic I need."

"You realize that -"

"Doesn't make sense." The way she's settled against him, spine arched against his torso, he can only hear her exasperated smile. "I know. I just don't get why it matters so much, that it doesn't make sense."

"Well." It only fleetingly occurs to him to soften the blow; he's never been anything less than perfectly blunt with her, and now's not the time for altering that habit. "It's like this -"

Again, she interrupts him. Never purposely; interjections only serve to illustrate how little lag there is, between her heart and her brain. Tiny as she is, she never really hesitates, not for fear, self-preservation, logic. "Don't tell me."

He arches an eyebrow. "Don't-?"

She shrugs, shifting her weight to nestle more comfortable against him. She doesn't want his answer anymore - needs it, maybe, but doesn't want it. Whatever explanations he could have for her, they'd force her to stop assuming they're immune to momentum; the question itself was enough of a forward-thrust to scare her back into hibernation. Whatever his logic, whatever science he appeals to, let him have it. "I don't want to know anymore."

The difference, then, between explication and action; she loves him in feeling, he returns the sentiment backed by empirical evidence. While she goes manic with desperation, he merely suspends his disbelief for long enough to admit he wants her in his life. It's simple, in that respect - he's there to catch her as she falls in love, but only because he knows the laws of physics.

"I love you."

Never one to offer an "I love you", he's more than happy to return one bestowed upon him. "I love you too, baby."

As she settles in to fall asleep in his arms, he wonders, momentarily, whether he ought answer her question anyway. Explain how worthless naive optimism is in comparison to his more guarded version of love and all its casualties. Whether he ought explain the near-mathematics of it. It's not that he doesn't love her, of course; the love he's capable of just differs from her wholehearted denial of anything but her whimsical rewriting of reality. She loves him by fiction's guiding light; in return, he loves her in spite of everything that tells him not to.

But the moment passes, and she obviously didn't want to know anyway. Didn't want to know that, in spite of everything, he quite genuinely loves her, too.

this is disgustingly sappy t'wards the end. but they're the sweetest characters, and i can't much tinker with the end without dropping parts i quite like, so. suck it up, people. in as far as my fiction's a fairly accurate representation of my overall moods, this is probably a good thing.

In the disorienting darkness of dead of night, even silence isn't silent anymore. Discerning position in the world suddenly becomes a matter of sound, not sight; struck blind, orientation relies entirely on audio. In darkness, sound is vital.

It's three am. One of those hours that's neither day nor night; noon to the nocturnal world. She's still awake, sleep-deprived near-hysteria amplifying sound to accommodate for the expansive darkness.

"Are you awake?" She already knows the answer, of course. Regular enough insomnia has taught her the audio clues: the steady one-two step of his heartbeat alters just slightly the moment he crosses from sleep into dim awareness of the world outside his dreamscape. That slight hitch in his breath as he plummets back into his body.

When he doesn't respond, she heaves an impatient sigh; not loud enough to wake him. Turns over noisily, then flips onto her back. When staring at the ceiling proves no different than staring off into space while curled up on her side, she tries again. "Baby. You awake?" Louder this time, but still quietly enough to plead ignorance if need be.

Ah, there. His heartbeat hiccups into wakefulness; he exhales quietly. For a moment, she thinks he'll pretend he hasn't heard her, but finally he reaches over and taps an acknowledgement against her arm, still too half-asleep for speech.

See, they've learned their own version of morse code, in their time together. Every couple in love has their own language; some fleeting sequence of numbers, or gestures, or looks, or touches, that communicate more in silence than speech ever could. This was theirs. Gentle taps of their fingers against tables, desks, chairs, each other's skin. Blips and pauses decipherable only to them.

One, two, three; I, love, you.

After a few moments silence, he manages words. "Can't sleep, love?" He asks knowing full well the answer; her insomnia, in turn, his own. Shared suffering, that eternal damnation of coupledom.

"Nope." She rolls over to nestle in the crook of his arm, his body heat regulating her slightly wonky internal thermostat. "Again." She busies herself with tracing circles along the bare skin of his chest, more for the orienting sensation of touch than anything else.

He pats her head, nearly missing in the dark. "Wanna talk about it?" It, of course, referring to whatever thoughts are plaguing her poor, sleep-deprived mind. Their only cure for her habitual insomnia; a complete reboot of her synapses by way of hours of narration that take them very nearly straight through 'til morning. A messy solution, as far as these things go, but beggars, as they say, can't be choosers. Whatever it'll take, for the chance of proper sleep the next night.

"Nope."

She feels him shift underneath her, automatically looking towards her despite the heavy darkness. "Baby." She can hear the warning in his voice, the characteristic half-step lowering. He's too tired for her moods, and if this is one of them, he'll merely roll over and leave her to her lonely insomniatic purgatory.

She giggles and throws a hand out in an attempt to find the light switch, wincing as light floods the room and restores sight as the predominant sensory input. "C'mere." Reaches out a hand for his, attempting to tug him out of bed.

"Crazy broad," he mutters, countering her weight and trying to pull her back, eyes still shut against the unwelcome brightness. Willful blindness, now. "Get into bed."

She stands up, digs in her heels and tugs. "Please?" He opens one eye, succumbs to her puppy-dog pout, and allows her to lead him around the house; his eyes still closed as he mentally navigates the layout of their home. Then they take a turn that surprises him, even in blindness. "Where're we --"

She's brought them to the back porch, their modest little outdoor haven. Through the screen door, the sound of crickets and the constant rustle of foliage. "We," she says, pulling open the door and stepping out, "are sleeping out here."

He raises a skeptical eyebrow. "We'll get eaten alive. And catch West Nile, and die."

"Shut up; I'm the melodramatic one." She dismisses his skepticism with a giddy, childish pirouette. "Come on, baby. Not sleeping out here is better than not sleeping in there, innit?"

Finally, he concedes, settling in beside her in an only partially uncomfortable outdoor lounge chair. By starlight, the darkness is less oppressive; sight possible, but less necessary, in light of other sensory input. Sound and scent and touch enough to drive a person to overload, under the stars. "So, this is actually kind of nice."

Her sleepy giggles reverberate through his ribcage. "G'night, baby."

"'night, love."

The sun has only just begun to set, but she's already backed up against a wall. Spine shattered by the force of all the sharp pleasures of the body, muscles mutilated by the weight of love turned fierce, feral. He's at her like an alley stray; she reciprocates with fingernails, tongue and teeth. Anything that will leave a mark permanent enough to outlast her fear of losing him. Desperate in the darkness, they fall willingly prey to a kind of doomed pleasure. Her weight supported by his body, forcing her upwards and into the wall, back arched to suffer the worst of the friction.

She spends every day looking forward to the precise moment when sunlight gives way to the only hours of the night worth living through, lipstick smears of color that announce the inevitability of a darkness so profound her pupils cannot hope to attenuate. When the universe contracts from an artist's palette of color into a single pinprick of light --forcing her, and the man who shares her bed, to navigate by touch alone. Touch, and taste, and sound, and a familiarity so deep she could tear him open and sew him up, blind.

This warm-blooded night, one just like any other, she had turned to him, a vague twist of her hips that brought her within inches of his heat-soaked body. The fading light of sunset had turned his brown eyes the color of strawberries and chocolate; vivid carmine shot through golden syrup, light refracted to throw off color deeper than reality. Shadows gathered across his shoulders, over his bare chest.

He'd asked her, then, to follow him to the ends of the earth -- stripped the question of its cliche, and asked her to choose between him and whatever part setting plays in any of the more elaborate narratives. An ultimatum, not even phrased as such; regardless of you, I'll go where I need to.

She'd frozen; delayed an answer in the only way she knew how. Pressed her hips into his, and guided him into her.

Sex, stripped of all ends, goes ballistic.

She, lost to the words that normally save her, throws back her head and brands him in every way she knows how; he merely carries her weight, as he's always done, pleasure allaying any concern he might of had, had he been a different man.

Once sex has torn them to pieces, stripped layers of skin from their backs, shoulders, thighs, he lowers her to the ground. His heart and hers, a syncopated rhythm, already beginning to slow. Eyes on his, she speaks the next words as if they're her first: "We can watch the sun rise and set from anywhere you want."

It takes him a moment to extrapolate the meaning from the statement; 'anywhere' in the broadest sense of the word -- she's just agreed to follow his whim, wherever it takes them. He leans over her, trapping her against the wall again. Not trusting the pleasure centers in her brain not to have forced her hand. "Anywhere."

She nods; eyes bright with fever, skin damp with sweat. As earnest as he's ever seen her, and he's never known her to lie. Well. Never known her to lie to him, save those told under the safety of pseudonym. Her alter-ego more the liar than she's ever been capable, in reality.

By now, sunset is a distant memory; they're bathed in darkness and silver light. Love, struck blind, has a plethora of alternatives available; navigation, in the dark, never as much an unknown as that first lonely step out into traffic.

After a moment, he subsides, satisfied. Love, when faced with the choice, always believes.