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“Here.”
When you snap back to reality, there’s a steaming mug in your face. You reach up, fingers brushing his as you take hold and bring the mug to your face, inhaling the aroma. “Thanks, Simeon.”
“Of course.” He doesn’t mention how often you’re so lost in thought now. Calling you back from your mind is a daily occurrence, and he mostly suspects it has everything to do with having been thrown back into the distant past. You had promised him—everyone, really—that nothing horrible had happened to you; and even Solomon had sworn it. Though clearly something has been weighing heavy on your mind ever since your return, Simeon knows you’ll tell him when you’re ready, so he hasn’t pressed too hard to get you to talk. He instead does his best to keep things normal and pretends he doesn’t notice when your mind wanders a bit too long; pretends to not find the way you’ve seemed more wanting for physical affection telling, but it is quite the challenge each time you get that painfully faraway look in your eyes.
Simeon watches the steam roll up around your face for a long moment, contemplating your expression, before deciding the scent of your favorite tea is doing its job.
You watch him move across the room, towards the hamper, where he pulls his shirt up over his head, then deposits it inside; revealing the long expanse of his back. The scars greet you in deafening silence and all those old feelings threaten to overwhelm you once again. In the past, you were awash with the guilt of knowing his fate. Here, back home in the present, it’s difficult to battle away the guilt for allowing it to happen in the first place.
Maybe if you had stayed, you could have changed things. Could have prevented his loss somehow. He never would have suffered all that pain. He’d still be an angel…
Before he can change shirts, a warmth suddenly blankets his back. Simeon pauses, blinks down at your arms hooking around his torso, at your hands bracing his chest. Feels the way you bury your face between his shoulder blades; looks back the best he can with you anchoring him in place as he calls your name in question.
When he feels the softness of your lips, Simeon immediately recognizes you’re tracing his scars, pressing kisses to them before moving onto the next. His laugh is soft, full of fondness as he reaches up to run his hands along the length of your arms, finds your hands and covers them with his own. This isn’t so unusual; his back is often subject to extra attention when you’re feeling more affectionate, and yet he can sense some familiar sort of almost-tangible melancholy lingering in the air around you. He knows this because you are prone to lavishing more attention to his scars in particular when you let self-purported past mistakes obstruct your thinking. Blaming yourself for the loss of his angelhood is usually at the forefront of these woes.
Simeon slots his fingers between yours, worming them beneath your palms to hold hands. He supposes meeting him again back then, when he was still celestially intact, must have dredged up the guilt you seem incapable of truly shaking; no matter how many times he gently admonishes your refusal to believe otherwise.
Your arms snaking around his midsection, or an arm, or shoulders wasn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence since you’ve gotten back, either. And if that is what has been on your mind since your return, Simeon now realizes it has been so much more than simply being relieved to be back when you belong.
With the pieces falling into place, Simeon traces the side of your hand with his thumb, laughing quietly and sounding amused at your refusal to let him go, “It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”
“..but I might,” your muffled voice answers. You feel him pause again, before abruptly turning in your hold; arms wrapping around you tightly as he pulls you impossibly closer.
Simeon tucks you into his chest, chin resting over your head; overcome with the want to apologize for being unable to prevent it happening; wants to promise to never let it happen again. A promise he knows, now as a human, couldn’t be so easily kept. And just speaking the words, just providing lip service in the hopes of making you feel better in the moment wouldn’t be fair. But that is his burden to bear; he’d made his choices without regret, and would continue to live with them, so long as it meant he could continue at your side.
His fingers card slowly through your hair with delicate motions, as if counting the threads of the world’s finest silk. “Should you ever, I’ll find you again.” Simeon takes a small, shuddering, breath. He’s done well to compose himself in the terror of your sudden absence, and even better quelling all the anxiety that threatened to burst forth all at once upon your return. But in this moment, you can feel the thick miasma of worry bleeding out of him in the face of needing to be brave. “As many times as it takes, I will bring you home.”
Even in his human-state, you full-heartedly believe him. With a being so quietly fierce as Simeon, you wouldn’t be surprised if he somehow manifested his own angelhood back in a moment of desperation to serve his greater purposes.
“I never want to see another world where you’ve forgotten me,” you confess. “But I can’t help but think how your life may have been changed for the better if I stayed...”
“Never think that.” Both his hands gently grip the sides of your face, but strong enough to lift you away from his chest; expression suddenly that rare benign sternness as he searches your eyes. “My life, in any form, would always be so very woefully wanting, bereft of you.”
“Don’t use your purple-prose-tongue to distract me from being sad…”
“Why not?” Simeon pauses to stroke your cheeks with his thumbs, not fighting the smile pulling the corners of his mouth. “Isn’t it working?” He doesn’t prevent you going forward, hiding your face against his neck; relieved when you laugh.
Arms folding back around you, Simeon carefully backs you up step-by-painstaking step until corralling you to bed, and is miraculously able to maneuver both of you under the covers without ever letting you go.
It’s a mystery you’re not even bothering to consider. Right now all that matters is his warmth, his presence, and how well that alone works to calm you down. Makes you realize just how tired you actually are, and have been. How little you’ve actually been sleeping.
“Rest, my love,” you hear his voice through the haze of slumber already staking its claim over your consciousness, heralded by the soothing path of his fingertips across your scalp, “I’ll be with you when you wake.”