In This Bed
by Siarade
DISCLAIMER: The characters belong to Marvel, and are used without permission for entertainment purposes only.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hi, first-time fic poster, long time reader. This is my first real foray into X-Fiction, and somehow it managed to come out mostly experimental in format. Even so, I'd love to hear what you think of it. All characters belong to Marvel and I'm casually disregarding that whole copyright thing. However, I make up for it by earning absolutely nothing for my effort.
I have a few people to thank: DuAnn Cowart, who made the introductions to Cable and Domino; and Alicia MacKenzie, who made me fall in love with them. Last but certainly not least, Darqstar, who brought me to this whole universe in the first place.
A little warning -- it's not steamy by any means, but this story does deal with adult matters and has references to sex. Be advised.
I can see your war. Here, behind your eyes, open or shut. I can see it in you, all through you, in your blood. It travels with you, through you, inside you, always.
I can feel your war, too. Here, in your fingertips as they touch the back of my neck, the length of my calf, the slide that makes my spine. I can feel it like you feel my skin. In this bed, I can almost touch it as I lay my hand over your heart. And I can hear your war when I place my ear where my hand was, on your chest. I can hear it as it pounds through your bones and muscle and skin, talking to the world from inside you.
It's your war, and you can't, won't share it. It's yours and no one else can have it, can take it on and fight it but you. Not even me, not even when you're sleeping and Apocalypse walks behind your eyes, and you need someone else to fight him off, to force your war into a few hours standstill so you can wake rested and take up your arms again in the morning.
So instead you wake up exhausted, having sleepwalked through another battle, dreamwalked towards death, and you wipe the mud and sweat and bullets and gore off your mind, wipe it on the front of your shirt so I can see it on you. In you, on you.
We can step inside the shower together, and I can wash it away with the soap of my touch for a while. But I can still see your war, fighting behind your eyes, strategizing and running and firing behind your eyes. You can close them, and let the water hit you in the face -- I've hit that face before. Knuckles to nose, I've hit that face. But sometimes I think the water hurts you more.
You can take the towel, wrap us both in it it's so big, tie us together in cotton and leftover steam. You can wrap me in your arms, in all the love and hurt you have in you. You can do all this and I can still hear, see, touch your war. You can trace the bullseye in my face and let me cry, and you can let me pretend I didn't cry because my pride can't take my own tears, even over you.
You can do it everyday for the rest of our lives, but I'm not sure you will. Maybe I'm not sure you can. Maybe I'm not sure of anything at all, maybe all possibilities are fake. Maybe Apocalypse will win and I'll end up mourning you lost to the ocean or the desert or the sunset, maybe I'll love you forever and never know. I can dream of all the children we'll never have and all of the love we'll never make. I can dream of living alone and being sure that it's my choice, what is being what is. I can do this, too. I can convince myself that I don't love you -- don't think I can't. I won't.
I can't stop your war, I can't even try. I can't even see what you're fighting -- the past, the future, the nature of evil and good and mankind and lies and truth, blood and earth. All you can want, I know, is to not let me see it. You've tried that before, walking away, turning away, in Japan while I'm in New York. But you always come back, you can always come back, as if you can forget that your war is you. But I can see it behind your eyes, flickering behind those closed eyelids in your sleep and in your dreams and while you make love to me, because you can't make yourself disappear.
I can walk my mouth across the continent of your shoulders, from the metal to the flesh, the cool to the warm, like travelling north to south, Yukon to Acapulco. There's a great divide in you, splitting you between bodies, between worlds, time, realities, lives. I can never quite make myself believe that you will be dead centuries before you lived and married and became a father and a widower. I can never quite accept that I will die, and you will die, before your wife is even close to being born -- that's the nature of the divide, and I can cross it right now, traverse it with my body, bind it together between my knees as I hold you down. You can be whole when you are between my knees, whole when I have you inside me. It's the only time you can.
I can watch your eyes, hiding that war behind them, as you look at me. I like the way you look at me, sometimes, and I can hate it at others, when you see me as a source of hurt. But when I look into those eyes, gold and blue, and see the singular vision out of that divided gaze, I can see myself as beautiful. Reflection in and reflected out, your eyes see me as beautiful. And I can love you for that, even if I run from it, and run from you.
I was talking about your shoulders. I can make my march, here in this bed, my eyes marking my steps as I cross it, from left to right. Your body can be a country for me to wander lost in, lying in bed like this. Scars are streams and rivers -- this one here, Stryfe's work, is like the Danube, and this one here, right under your shoulderblade and made before -- or after, really -- my time, is from you being stupid and valiant in the future, I can be sure. Bones are mountains and valleys. Lying in bed like this, wet hair is the sky. You can take me in your arms and make me forget that you are a country, so you can make me remember that you are a man. And afterward, when you're happy enough to sleep and Apocalypse is on a quiet front, I can try to keep your war quiet enough from hurting your dreams, and I can hate myself everytime I fail, and I can hate you for being a war that I can't fight in.
I can see the future in your eyes, in your war. You wear it like thousand-dollar shoes. It's so expensive, it wears you, and it's the first thing I see in the morning, when you're pushing sleep back into the past and rising to battle. You can open your eyes, flash me that golden look and take me before the sun rises, pin me to the bed and love me with all the power of that war in you. I can fall in love with your war just for that kind of good morning. I can love your war even as you bury yourself in me and almost give your war to me to hold for a while, so you can be at peace and free for the three seconds of your orgasm, and I can wish you could give it to me, if only for three seconds. I can fall in love with your hurt and your war because I fell in love with you. I can love all of you, even the anger and hate and pity and war. I can love you all the way around.
I can even love you enough to let you love me.
And I can live with the war in you, until the the day when all the treaties are signed and the traitors hung, and you can stop being your war so I can love you and you alone.