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The Game ended almost seven years ago. Two thousand some odd days. Sixty one thousand hours. Three million minutes. Seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, infinitesimal moments that pass the in flicker of an eye and say 'don't worry, don't worry, it's far away now, so far and getting further.' But time has a way of catching up with you, even though you're not a knight and you're not a god anymore.
(You never were a hero, that much hasn't changed.)
Sometimes when you close your eyes, you dream and in your dreams you find ghosts.
John's hands tense against your chest and you feel him exhale hot and close against the crook of your neck. It's grounding, almost; the even cadence of his breathing like a nightlight to ward off the monsters under the bed. Seven years since The Game and seven years since you really found, collided, crashed into one another in the most perfectly fucked up mangled wreck of two human beings ever. Kids with the weight of the world on your shoulders. Unfair, insurmountable odds.
And silver linings, despite it all.
Sometimes (most of the time) you hate yourself for letting the bad nearly overshadow the good even though he insists that you don't, that he knows, that it doesn't bother him that you can never really properly celebrate his birthday because.
Because.
The truth is that you're scared (weak) and you've been scared (weak) for a long time. The truth is you don't know what you'd do without him (the ghosts creep into your eyes when you're not being careful/I love you so much/things you never say enough).
The truth is you just don't know.
“Mmm. You awake?” His voice is muddled with sleep and too close to your ear, you feel the words more than you hear them.
“Hm.” Noncommittal sound that makes him press a soft kiss to the back of your neck, makes him tighten his grip on you. You don't have to explain, you never do anymore not since (I was in there for years, John, fucking lifetimes and I died so many god damn times. I can still feel it, all of them. I'm tired of knowing) that night, weeks after paradox space was ripped apart and made whole again. He reads you like a book. You haven't cried since, even when you wake up choking on the phantom taste of your own blood. You won't because he's always there to kiss your eyes dry. Seven years. Your silver lining. Your blue eyed anchor.
He shifts against you and you shift in tandem until he can see your face in the darkness. The shitty apartment you share isn't very well insulated and the blankets get waded up around your sides in the flurry. Cold air on your shoulders bites in sharp contrast to the heat of his palms. He laughs when he feels your goose bumps.
Soft, familiar lips on yours.
His hands go flat against your chest after breaking the kiss as he pushed himself up, straddles your hips with a lazy sort of practiced clumsygrace. Skin against skin and the cold isn't nearly as shocking as it was a second ago when he's against you like this and so, so real. Heart beat and body heat.
He laps at your mouth and you can remember a time when you had to coax this out of him; when he was all fire engine blushes and broken eye contact. It comes so easy now, like a secret code you both know. A language all your own. He's still smiling, just a little, as he starts to lean back and you're not quite sure when you got this hard. His hands weave into your hair and you can feel yourself starting to come apart. No theatrics and no show, just soft touches and gentle words and gentle kisses that make you forget all the terrible things you wish you'd never learned (the way it feels to die/the way it feels to die alone). No bravado, no story book fairy tale bullshit. Just two bodies, two people in love, enough to keep the dark away.
He writhes against you as you suck lazy bruises against his collar bone, his hand fumbling at a bad angle between your bodies. You'll both need to shower and you'll hate yourself, for sure, in the morning when you have to wake up early to go to work. It's three in morning and you're way past caring. It's not like you would have slept all that much anyway.
He drives you wild even after all this time. (Seven years. Two thousand days. Sixty one thousand hours.)
When you wake up to the blaring of your alarm hours (but not many) later, you're tangled together smelling like sweat and sex and it's somehow both simultaneously completely disgusting and completely romantic. You're more rested than you thought you'd be, all things considered. He blinks up at you like an owl and your press a kiss to the crown of his head.
You say 'I love you' and then you say 'Thank you' and you're not sure if he's awake enough to have really understood either but his smile is sleepy and peaceful and you know that he knows regardless. It's harder to pry yourself out of bed and out of his arms than it has any right to be.
The nightmares will come back, sure as shadows, and the ghosts that live in the worst parts of your mind will never really be gone. You'll never really forget the way it feels when you're heart stops beating and or what it's like to be well and truly doomed. But time will never stop taking you further and further away from all the things you wish you never had to be just like time will never stop bringing you closer and closer to what (who) you love.
You pad your way into the bathroom and in the shower, you don't hear the door open or the faucet run. When you step out, dripping, he's grinning at you with his hair standing on end in wild tangles. There's no real reason for him to be awake but you don't mind that he is.
You close the gap between the two of you and your wet skin leaves rorschach patterns in his oversized t-shirt.
“Have a good day,” he says and you kiss him. He tastes like mint toothpaste and all the parts of the world that were worth saving.