serenamente

[scubatankfilledwithfarts]

He has no idea where everyone is and frankly doesn’t want to know. Not even if someone is on fire, or someone gave Ed a gun [because everyone knows if Ein was given a firearm he would be responsible with it]—

Badou plops facedown onto the couch and tries to hold the tired groan in his chest. It stagnates there between his ribs, hisses out through his teeth and into the couch cushions that smell like cigarette smoke and peppers. The info broker is ready to sink into the fabric that somehow doesn’t smell of feet and just exist around this space for awhile. He feels an ache, somewhere between his pancreas and his heart.

[there’s no other way to put it: Faye’s hands stroking his hair, fighting over the last meatball with Ein, whining about cigarettes with Spike and Jet, spraying Ed’s feet with fungus spray, the way Faye’s nose crinkles when she laughs—

Home, and damn, are both 4 letter words after all]

He falls asleep on that stinky, narrow couch so completely he doesn’t even realize it until he’s woken up hours later, as the first rays of sunshine should inch across the horizon, to Faye’s body squeezed in the space between him and the back of the couch, without a single inch of space between them.

There’s a faint crick in his neck from where it’s bent at a weird angle against Faye’s bicep, and his arm is wedged under his side, completely numb. She’s got one leg flung over his hip and the other curled up high, digging into his stomach at the knee. Someone had pulled a blanket over them at one point, but it pools across their knees and onto the floor below, way too small to stretch over them.

Badou wonders if she’d been awake when she’d pulled him so much closer, so close that his nose is squished against her chest too. Nice. [and the thought of her reaching, reaching, reaching out for him in the dark sends a little burst of warmth through him--] He wriggles. Just a little bit, enough for breathing room, but neither the couch, nor Faye, give any leeway. This isn’t comfortable, or practical or anything but—but, but, but—

Badou angles his head up carefully, shifting his grip on the side of the couch. Her body leeches heat [like someone’s bald head and a knit cap]. She’s still asleep, breathing steadily through her mouth, features softened by some dream. Her hair falls like the dark trickle of a stream over her face, into her mouth. Occasionally she chews a strand or two. How doesn’t she have split ends? Oh he knows—it’s thanks to his shampoo. Or hers. Theirs.

He still feels an ache. Reaching up with nicotine-yellow tinged fingers he brushes that stream back from her face like a veil. He doesn’t go in for the kiss after the ‘you may kiss the b—‘. Like this, she can’t hide from him: the tiny flickers of her eyelids, the bowed lashes, the traces of birthmarks [and the taste of each one beneath his mouth], the way her makeup has smeared in the corners of her eyes. There’s a dusting of dirt around her chin. Faye makes a noise and rolls a little, chin bumping carelessly into his forehead.

He gazes into the warm dark of her throat, and not hesitating a second, shuts his eye and nudges his nose into the skin there. There’s their shampoo. Something citrus-y, but with a hint of Alyssum. Words buried deep in his heart where no one can hear them, can claim them and twist them any other way brim to the surface. This one’s mine.

[and no one can see it, can claim the smile on his face, tucked against Faye’s skin where it belongs]

Sometimes he wishes he had the words for it, could toil over ink and paper, capture it there. Sometimes he knows nothing he does will capture it—this isn’t a firefly caught between the planes of your fingers, light blinking, blinking, until it’s out—

Faye’s palm twitches at his ribs, and Badou pulls back to find the most sleepiest eyes in the world, steady and certain and looking at him.

“Hey, cutie,” she says, smiling wearily down at him through the space left between their faces. It isn’t much. The greedy sun can’t even peek through.

“Hey,” he answers, and thumbs a string of drool from her chin, unthinking, his face already hurting from the force of his smile. “You’ll never guess what local celebrity I saw with their ass hanging out.”

[He swears her intrigued hum, when she burrows a little closer, arms tightening around him, is the sound of his heart singing]