Work Text:
Nothing perilous
had come to find us. What was ours was ours.Michael Heffernan, Awake
He doesn't sleep well without her now. In the weeks they've been together, they've rarely spent a night apart. Vic's absence from his bed tonight is like a sound without rhythm, impossible to ignore. The hours pass in fitful snatches of restless sleep that melt into a listless stupor. His dreams are wispy fragments of turning to and reaching for.
When she slides under the sheet he feels her presence the way the tide must feel the moon. It's enough to bring him half-awake.
"What's wrong?" he mumbles, muzzy-headed, even as his hands welcome her in.
Settling herself against his side, she whispers, "Nothing. Go back to sleep."
But something's brought her here when she'd planned on going home. Against her lunar pull he opens his blurry eyes. No chance to see her face in the dim light through the window; she folds herself into him, head tucked under his chin.
"Vic," he tries again, still tangled in drowsy filaments.
Her breath paints flutters at his throat. "I'm okay, I promise."
The night swirls all around them, warm and heavy-pressing. His eyes blink once and the world itself goes spangled dark. "Okay," he sighs, succumbing.
For now her nearness is enough.
*
The interlude seems like a dream of a dream when he wakes later in the morning, yet there Vic lies, asleep beside him, with her head half under a pillow and the sheet twisted high around one leg. For a few minutes Walt allows himself the pleasure of just looking at her, his full heart feeling light enough to float.
Getting up, he finds a haphazard trail of discarded clothes leading out of the bedroom. He collects her bra dropped at the end of the bed, duty shirt crumpled by the door, jeans tangled near the piano bench, and boots—a sock half-stuffed inside each one—toppled over on the porch. He's relieved to find no sign of blood on anything.
It's not that he thinks she'd outright lie to him, not anymore, but the definition of "okay" is subject to interpretation, and she's been known to interpret it loosely. Then again, so has he.
A few hours pass before sounds of life begin filtering out from the bedroom. Walt puts fresh coffee on to brew and leans back against the sink to wait. When Vic walks into the kitchen with bare legs and tousled hair, his heart gives a joyous little leap. Even now he still can't quite fathom that his life is gifted with moments like these.
Rather than arrowing for the coffee pot as usual, Vic pads over and flops herself against him so that he's supporting most of her weight. Her arms loop around his waist and she hums when he rubs his hands across her back.
"Morning," she mumbles into his t-shirt.
Walt presses a kiss to the crown of her head. "Morning."
"Sorry for waking you up last night."
"You know I don't mind."
She makes an unidentifiable noise.
Amused, he registers her gradually leaning into him more heavily.
"Are you falling asleep on me?"
"Mm hmm."
He laughs softly. "Why don't you go back to bed for a while?"
A groan reverberates from her chest into his. "If I do I won't sleep tonight." She yawns hugely and then pushes herself upright, head tipped back as though it's too heavy for her neck to hold.
It's impossible to stop himself from smiling. "Go sit down. I'll bring you some coffee."
Her lips curve up in a grin. "My hero."
Ordinary sounds float in through the open windows and Walt picks them out idly as he pours: a male cicada serenading for a mate, some meadowlarks in heated conversation, a distant woodpecker tapping industriously for its lunch. The laundry drying on the line flaps and snaps in the grip of the wind.
Vic has collapsed on the couch with her legs curled up, blinking slowly in the bright morning sun. He passes her the mug and sits on the edge of the coffee table in front of her, aimlessly tracing the curve of her knee as he takes her in. Glossy nail polish shimmers on her toenails; both of her shins are bruised. She unfurls one leg and rests her foot on his thigh, scrunching her toes against the denim of his jeans. He sketches slow circles around the inside of her ankle with his thumb and gets a flirty smile from behind the rim of her mug.
It had surprised him at first how tactile she is, how much she likes to touch and be touched. To him she'd always seemed so self-contained. But when he thought about how ruthlessly he'd been suppressing his own desires, he understood that she'd been doing the very same. Now he has the privilege of knowing that she expresses her affection as freely and unabashedly as she does everything else.
He loves the casual way she'll reach for him or take his hand, the way she curls into him and uses him as a pillow, how she'll stand with her arm around his waist and her hand in his back pocket. He loves the way she responds to his touch, how she arches and relaxes against him, even pushing into his hands in unreserved demand. There's something almost feline about it — though less house cat than lioness. She's unafraid to take and even less afraid to give, and the combination bewitches and astounds him.
"So," he says, when she rests the half-empty mug in her lap. "You want to tell me about last night?"
Vic bites her lip for a few seconds, considering him. Underneath the scent of coffee, the breeze carries with it the faintest whiff of hay. She leans forward to set her mug next to his hip and then sits back again, setting both feet on the floor. Her knees press together between his splayed legs.
"We got a call about a body at that old abandoned makeout barn," she begins. "You know the one."
He nods. It's not the first body they've found there.
"Zach and I went to check it out. It was a girl, nineteen, Utah driver's license. She was hanging from the center beam. There were no signs of struggle, nothing to indicate anyone else had been there, and no marks on her that we could find except from the ligature." She pauses and Walt's stomach launches into free-fall because he knows exactly what's coming. "It won't be official until we get the autopsy results, but we both knew it was suicide."
The word sends him into a strange quantum state. He's here, now, but he's also living a night from months ago.
"I finally saw a way out," Vic says and he's suffocating on an airless, caved-chest feeling, imagining her skull shattered by her own bullet.
"Zach found her car," she continues. "Looked like she'd been living out of it for a while. I went through her phone but there wasn't much recent activity. Hardly any calls or texts. Only a handful of social media posts. It's like she was kind of just slipping out of her own life. And it made me think... that could've been me, you know?"
Walt shakes his head in mute denial because it could never be her. Can't ever. She's promising him. She's already promised.
"You can never, ever do anything like that again. You promise me," he says, demands, begs, with his stomach, his heart, his whole horrified self in his throat.
Vic's eyes are focused somewhere far away. "I was there, kneeling on the ground. I had the gun to my temple." She mimics the motion, lost in the memory, and Walt wants to yell, shake her, anything to pull her out of the past. "And then, I don't know why, but I thought about someone finding my body. The whole process kind of just happened in a flash in my head, how you'd have to do the identification. What a terrible thing that would be for you. And when I thought of you having to go through that, I couldn't do it."
She looks at him, then, there with him again in the present. "I hurt so bad and I just wanted to make it stop. But I couldn't hurt you too. And this girl... she didn't have that. She didn't have anybody who was worth hurting for."
Her voice breaks and there are tears in her eyes but she's smiling.
Walt's body moves of its own volition, sliding him to his knees and doubling him over, his arms clutched around her hips, his face against her thighs. He shakes, gasping for breath, knows he's gripping her too hard, he might leave bruises, but he can't stop, he can't let go, gripped himself by something within him almost too vast to contain. It's too much to make any kind of sense; it's all disorder, confetti in a strong wind.
Vic folds herself over him like the loving roof of the world and strokes his shoulders, his neck, presses her cheek to his hair. "When I thought about it last night, it just, it made me feel so lucky and so... grateful. Even if we never had what we have now, my life would still be better because you're in it."
There's a blazing ball of light expanding deep within his chest, bathing every part of him in brilliance. Her knees dig into his ribs and he wonders if she can feel his heart crashing against them in all its terror and joy.
She sits back, but her fingers linger in his hair, gentle as her voice in his ears. On a deep breath Walt unlocks his muscles and pushes up to look at her. Words clog his throat but he's unable to utter more than her name. Vic gives him a shrug and a lopsided smile.
"So that's why I woke you up in the middle of the night."
He reaches out to take her hand with his own, not quite steady. So very far from steady. He can't catch his breath or speak or do anything but feel the wild havoc she wreaks in him. This is the paradox of her danger and her safety: how deeply he can be wounded, how widely he can love. He's the earth that lies above the meeting of great tectonic plates. Mountains split asunder and new ones shoulder their way into the endless, endless sky.
Vic turns her hand beneath his and grips his wrist to tug on it lightly. "Come on, you'll kill your knees if you stay like that."
His limbs feel heavy with exhaustion but his head is light and almost dizzy as he rises stiffly to sit beside her. She immediately curls into him, over him, until she's sitting astride his thighs, her brow resting against his. Her hands settle lightly on his jaw and one thumb strokes gently beneath his ear. The weight of her living warmth is everything he needs. Walt brushes her hair back where it's fallen over one shoulder and tucks it behind her ear, holding her to him, pulling her as close as he can, wanting to imprint the feel of her on himself and carry an echo of her shape on his skin.
Slowly, their breathing falls into a single rhythm. Vic tilts her head and kisses him softly, her lips brushing and lingering against his. Everything that was taut and knotted just minutes ago begins to loosen in a gentle transmutation, his base substance transformed by the alchemy of her touch. The shift in tenor is heady, makes him feel just a little drunk. All his senses are brought into crisp focus; all his scattered pieces settle firmly within his flesh. A humming current begins in his lips and runs all the way through him, thickening his blood and quickening his breath.
Vic leaves him with the lightest lick on his upper lip as she eases away. Her skin is faintly flushed and her changeable eyes shine like the clearest amber in the mid-morning sunshine. They regard him solemnly. "There's one other thing I should tell you."
"Okay."
She holds his gaze for a drawn out moment, then, very seriously, she says, "I'm not wearing anything under this shirt."
It drags a surprised laugh from his chest and her face lights up with the wide beautiful smile he loves best.
"Well," he says, slipping his hands underneath the hem of her borrowed shirt. "Maybe we should do something about that."
Gripping him with her thighs and demonstrating considerable control of her abdominal muscles, Vic leans backwards. Her fingers begin to work methodically down the row of buttons, gradually exposing an enticing strip of skin. "I hear sex is supposed to be life-affirming," she says with a quirk of her lips.
Walt trails the backs of his fingers down her breastbone from her throat to her navel. "That's what they say."
When the last button has come undone, she slides from his lap to stand before him in nothing but his open shirt. Within its folds her skin glows with the rich luster of a natural pearl. Looking down at him, she cocks her head to the side, one eyebrow arched, and eyes him with amused intent. "Well take your pants off, stud, 'cause we're about to affirm the shit out of it."