Work Text:
It’s that warmth, the safe feeling that starts in your stomach and erupts up your spine, the one that comes as his skin touches yours, fingers barely grazing down your arm before encircling your wrist. It’s the feeling that spreads like wildfire as he pulls you closer, arms slipping loosely around your waist.
There’s just a moment’s pause then as he waits for you to lean into him, to give him permission to help you forget the world. He waits until he feels the hot air of your next breath against his neck, waits until the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. It’s then that he shifts his arms to rest across your back, to wrap you in his embrace and squeeze you to him. He holds you tight and tells you, without words, that he’d really rather not let go.
It’s the way he’s learned when your thoughts have grown dark or when someone said something that struck just a little too close to a nerve or when the nightmares that haunt the darkness at night have kept you up and are haunting you in the shadows of the light. He catches the hardening of your features, how your brown eyes become cold and unfocused, how you’re just a second too slow at answering the question. It’s then that he subtly pulls the attention off of you, starts telling a story that may not even answer the question or starts redirecting questions to give you a moment to collect yourself. It’s the way he does it, sometimes before you even realize you need him to.
It’s the times he’s able to say everything and absolutely nothing, just when you need to hear it. He’s especially good at that after interviews, when the questions feel more like personal attacks and you find yourself at home crying afterwards. He always seems to be there or appear with all the right words or no words at all. And that comfort he provides? It always helps, even if you end up throwing him out of the flat before he even has a chance.
It’s how it’s taken this long for you to realize that the both of you, together, are more than what the war created. You may scream and fight and leave no words unspoken, but at the end of the night, hours after you’ve stormed out of the flat for the first time (usually it’s him to leave, to go find space to cool off), you return to him. You quietly unlock the door of the flat the pair of you share, finding a light on. Anxiety curls in your stomach, but in the same breath, you think about how he’s always been there, and how you always want him to be there.
It’s how when you turn the corner to find him asleep on the couch, a failed attempt at waiting up for you, that you realize what you knew all along…
You are in love.