#idk i thought of this and it hurt me

[insp]

Jamison wakes to someone kissing his neck.

Bleary and dazed, he opens his eyes to a black ceiling. His secluded alcove in the watchpoint’s barracks is still mired in shifting shadow; scant blades of light peer in from beneath the patchwork drape swathed over the threshold, just bright enough to skip pale slants across the chrome floor, but nothing more. The blankets have been rucked down toward the edge of his mattress—too hot, too suffocating, too close—his left foot half tangled in the thick of them to keep the inevitable creeping paranoia banished beneath his bed.

There it is again: a shy yet steady pressure pathing from the hollow of his throat.

He isn’t dreaming. He can’t be. His dreams never happen like this. When they settle in, they yield shrouds of choking smoke and swatches of dripping ruins and sheets of glistening metal. Plumes of fire spark the way, flickering with faded echoes of forgotten things long since passed. Garbled voices find him in the dark, a constant and deafening roar, ramping and ramping and ramping until it’s as if an engine means to split his head and he can do nothing but gasp in empty paralysis. When he’s dreaming, the wasteland always rises up from beneath and swallows him like quicksand—

And yet someone is kissing him.

His neck, his shoulder, his collarbone, his cheek, his jaw. It’s soft, hesitant, in gentle patterns of twos and threes, and with a tenderness that sends pleasurable prickles down his spine. A soft weight pools over top of him, centered somewhere over his chest, an anchor to keep him from lapsing back into smoke and nightmares.

After he spends another moment blinking in blackness, he lets the rest of his senses guide him. A leg hooks around his, joining his ankle hidden amongst the sheets. The warmth of a hand presses down by his sternum while the mattress dips at his right side. Disheveled drapes of hair brush his cheek as a kiss presses to his jawline, delicate and silky and threaded with a familiar spice. The dim bleed of a crystal catches in his peripheral; the pressure shifts, and then the moon glides in to frame his face; another kiss at his chin.

Realization sculpts his thoughts, and he finds himself at a loss for words.

This feels… god, he doesn’t know. Good? It feels good? It feels so good he ought to be dreaming but he isn’t because his dreams are never like this and yet it doesn’t quite make sense to him because surely she’d ask before coming in here—but it feels good, like that tight, elated feeling he gets when he watches his creations burst, like that lilting drum on the undersides of his ribs when he gets a shred of praise. It’s all gentle strums on his heartstrings and enveloping warmth cornered inside his lungs, guided by a grounding touch that sweeps the sands away and lets him breathe.

Try as he might, he can’t remember a time anyone has cared to kiss him awake.

And that sort of… hurts, he thinks, but in a good way—because while it might not have happened before, it is happening now, and that is something he can live with.

Tentatively, he lets his left hand coast up the curve of Satya’s back. Her nightgown rumples under his thumb, but he keeps stroking in scattered patterns as she traces a trail of kisses along his clavicle. Each touch earths tiny coals in his skin.

A part of him wants to ask why she’s here. He should know better than to assume she’d want to visit like this on her own accord, especially in the dead of night. (Or morning? Is it morning? It might be. He does tend to lose track of time after the sun sets.) Perhaps shades of her own came skulking out from beneath her bed and chased her here? While he does not think of himself as a particularly effective nightmare deterrent, if she would rather spend her time with him until sunrise, he isn’t going to complain.

In fact, he could get used to this. He really could. He doesn’t sleep well and when he does manage to doze off it is often out of necessity, but waking up like this? God, it’s almost unfair. Exhaustion weighs his movements, heavy and lethargic with fatigue, but he doesn’t want to fall asleep again because he might miss her, he might miss this—and she feels so warm and comforting and he wants to do so much more than knead small circles into her back but he is so unbelievably tired, his heart a fluttering mess—

And then Satya sinks down into the pillow beside him, a kiss against his shoulder. Her right hand slides across his belly and locks with his left, and although he cannot cradle her completely without his prosthesis, he crooks his elbow inward and tries nevertheless.

Jamison nuzzles into her hair and lets his consciousness slip.

Squeezing her fingers, he hopes she’ll still be here when he wakes.