you shine

[scubatankfilledwithfarts]

His wake up call has nothing on angelic singing, on the twittering of happily mating birds or the silence that reigns after construction workers have been hammering away since 4am and its blessedly quiet.
Dave’s involves the whisper of fingernails down his spine and a voice in his ear lovingly telling him:

“It’s your turn to make breakfast. And don’t put the burnt parts in the begonias in the kitchen because I’ll know.”

The redhead grumbles and huffs, twists around to curl his arms around her, strands of thick hair in his mouth as he husks out-- “How you like your eggs? Fried or fer—”
The heel of the hand that shoves him away could have been rougher. All he wants to do is stay in bed, and it’s as though the world wants to drag him from his reprieve. But he won’t let it.

“Botch, make breakfast.”

Only when silence follows does Dave lift his head from the pillow to peer at the foot of the bed where he expects—well its unclear.

“You know he isn’t your dog, right,” Pam says more than asks, already pulled away from his warmth, brush in hand to comb through tangled locks. She doesn’t even look at him and Dave likes to think it’s because he’s too handsome and rugged in the morning.

[what he won’t admit is he’s as disillusioned as Butch is]

“Well don’t we have like, a goon for that? For making breakfast and getting stuff?” He struggles out the other side of the bed, struggles to thread a leg through rumpled boxers, to not fall on his face while hopping on one foot.

When she does deign him suitable to look at it’s to look down her cute nose at him. “That’s why I have you.”

He stops, hands on his hips. Mouth thinned. “Wow, I’m sending that to the council to get reviewed. Your tenure is up, professor.”

[does she know that when she blossoms it isn’t only when the fire of the fight burns her enemies to the marrow, it isn’t when she’s in front of some stupid microscope with glasses perched on her nose and it isn’t quite in the moments the shoulders with the weight of the world bend to the dark—

Its lashes curled against the curve of her cheek, the little pucker of a dimple against the onslaught of her lips ticked back into a smile]

[for all of the authority he kicks dirt at, the laws he toes at, he’s utterly, utterly weak]

He does as he’s told, not in a daze but in the dozy comfort of the domestics, and it doesn’t quite take ten minutes for the eggs to burn, for her to snap at him for catching him, pan held over the hungry maw of the aforementioned begonias.

But she stands by his side, washes while he dries, tip-toes soap-sudsy fingers along the back of his neck, curls them there [curls them into his chest and whatever she pulls out he’ll lose and won’t miss as long as she has it] and still kisses him even with the damp dishtowel over his shoulder.

“I’m into dark humor,” she says when ‘shake it bake it booty quake it’ doesn’t quite cut it.

“Wanna hear a joke?” He turns out the lights, grin gleaming in the splinters of sunlight through the blinds.

“I love you,” she laughs, and oh, his chest must be conclave with the sound of it. Her skin is just as warm as that blessed sound when his fingertips find the sliver of it between the hem of her shirt and his pants.