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It started the first snow of your freshman year in college.
Your parents lived near the campus, so there was no need to waste money by staying in the dorms. You had six AM programming classes every day of the week, so although you almost fell asleep on the road during your commute, you always had a fantastic parking spot. It was nice for escaping the heat of the summer, and even better for dodging the icy fingers of the winter. Even still, having lived in the area your whole life, you understood that the weather could turn nasty without warning, and it only made sense to be prepared for the worst.
Eridan Ampora didn't know any better.
He's from SoCal, living in a singlet in the newest dorm on campus, and he's looking out at the piles of snow that accumulated during your biology lab with increasing horror. It hadn't been quite so cold that morning, and clearly anticipating the weather to last, he'd donned only a jacket over what had to be a women's purple cashmere sweater. His breath was fogging the window and his glasses, and there had to be at least five inches out there. He was going to have to hike across campus, where the sidewalks would be an icy obstacle course on their own, in twenty degree, snowing weather, in a jacket.
And you were only skinnier than him by a hair, which meant he had absolutely no natural insulation.
"Hey."
His eyes were the color of mist, dark around the pupils and lightening till they almost looked shot through with wisps of clouds, foggy and gray but with the barest hint that the storm was starting to pass. His eyebrows rose, because he was a historical literature major and you were comp sci, and even though he didn't have any friends it wasn't because people didn't want to be, but because he snapped and snarled and spilled frog juice on his lab partners, so no matter how stunning he looked, he was always alone.
You didn't think you'd actually ever spoken to him.
"You're gonna freeze," you point out succinctly, and his shoulders scrunch and those storms become straight out hurricanes as he narrows his eyes. "Here."
It's not exactly a fashionable coat; you've had it for at least a couple years, and what used to be a deep, shiny black has faded and been washed so many times it just looks tired. The buttons are still tightly sewn on thanks to your father, and you know for a fact that the hood will keep the snow off his glasses, which makes it worth it's weight in gold. Eridan blinks owlishly at your offering before taking it gingerly with one hand, and you hope it's because he's unsure what to make of you and not because he thinks it's dirty.
"My car is parked right out front, and you have to go all the way across campus," you shrug, aiming for nonchalance and face-planting right in to awkward as per usual. "I figured you could use it more than me."
Pulling the thick woolen material around him, he starts to do up the single row of buttons splitting the coat right in half, only to stop, turning his nose down towards the collar and inhaling through his nose. Before you can even begin to panic (did it smell like coffee or maybe whatever your dad had made for dinner last night fuck shit damn) he exhales audibly, the skin under the freckles of his nose dusted pink, and tucks his hands in the spacious pockets.
"Thanks, Sol," he says, and that one clipped syllable makes your heart turn somersaults.
He steals your t-shirts like some sort of possessed raccoon building a nest somewhere within the depths of his dorm room. You spend time there more often than at your house because of the isolation it provides (although your dad insists he comes to dinner at least twice a week, because cafeteria food is a travesty), but you still have no idea where they go, or how he even manages to hide them away in the first place.
You would be a little unnerved about it, but as soon as you started dating, it became blatantly obvious that he liked the way you smelled. Scent wasn't something you were terribly conscious of before meeting him; you didn't wear cologne or use expensive body wash or weird lotion; just some generic brand bar stuff and the equivalent shampoo, but Eridan is constantly burying his face in your hair, nosing your neck, and rubbing his cheek against your t-shirt, breathing in deep before letting it out in a happy sigh.
"It's gotta be the pheromones, Sol," he'd said, ignoring your eye roll of disbelief. "I see the crappy stuff you use in the shower, no way you would smell so heavenly without some sort of biological aid."
"I think your sense of smell is just broken."
The mystery of the missing shirts was solved completely by accident, when you climbed through the window to his dorm when he locked himself out and the RA was too hungover to pick up his phone and lend them the spare. Because he was clearly a sheltered silver-spooned brat, Eridan never remembered to lock his window, so you clambered up the awkwardly high distance between the ground and the first floor window, getting briefly stuck with your upper body hanging into his scrap booking materials and your feet kicking uselessly. He upends you rather inelegantly on to his rug (which is a flattened globe, where does he even find this stuff), and the flip you executes nearly breaks your glasses but at least you're not stuck outside any more.
On the way to the door, you catch sight of a familiar intergalactic villain out of the corner of your eye, and knowing that your boyfriend would never own anything with Darth Vader on it, your attention is diverted to the bed, where your favorite Star Wars shirt is wrapped happily around the pillow settled in the middle of the bunch at the head of his bed. From where you're standing, it looks almost like the pillow has been shoved up inside the pillow.
The amused tilt of his mouth (probably getting ready to make a smart comment about what your ass looked like hanging out the window) drops when he sees the wide grin on yours. "Pillowcases? Really?"
He blushes all the way down his neck under his scarf, not even trying to reign in his horror. "W-well, they stop smellin' like you after a few days."
You put your hands on your hips (something that you started doing just to mock him, but quickly became a nasty habit you both shared). "You're gonna stretch them out, and I'm getting tired of wearing the same thing every week."
He ducks his head, spinning the stress ring around his middle finger and scowling somewhere in the direction of your belt. "It makes it feel like you're here, so I sleep better."
Your glasses click together, a brush of metal against plastic, when you kiss him, fingers under his chin to get his face turned up towards yours. He's still embarrassed, you can feel the heat against your own cheeks, but it doesn't stop him from wriggling closer, hands twisting in your messy hair and moving his lips against yours until someone in the hall starts catcalling.
"At least give me my Star Wars shirt back. You know how much I love that one."
"Maybe this is actually a well-disguised attack on your fashion sense, which you seem to have been born without, because t-shirts should absolutely not be worn to museum exhibit openings, I don't care what the fuck is on them-"
"It was Ben Franklin!"
"He was in a convertible with porn stars!"
That was also the first of your shirts to go missing, so you think it may be a little of column a and a little of column b.
You have to travel a lot when you land your first serious IT job. Eridan is a trooper, and deals with you being gone as best as he can. Already he spent a good deal of time at home, working on his novels and teaching university classes from the laptop in his office, so you know that losing the one human being he has constant contact with had to be difficult, no matter how much he waved it off and smiled and waved at the airport. It feels like the first year of your marriage, you spend more time on a plane than you do at home with him, and it's only the promise of a stable position with a great income that keeps you from not just giving your company the middle finger.
Because really, you want to be able to buy him the expensive little trinkets that he used to afford when he was living off his parent's dime but can't any more, you want to buy a house that the two of you can make your own and grow old in, you want to travel with him to the house in Sicily where he was born, and all these things you just can't accomplish without money. It doesn't stop you from feeling like you got hit by a train as you trudge up the three flights of stairs to your apartment, and the jet lag is already threatening to send you crashing on the couch without even trying to make it to bed.
But you're glad you do. He's curled up like a comma in the middle of the thick blankets and the quilt his grandmother sent as a wedding present, some sort of biography half lost amidst the sea of bright colors, and without even looking you can tell that the pages are going to be hopelessly rumpled when he wakes up (and rumpled books make him rumpled too). One hand is still stretched out towards the book, like he really had just laid his head down to get comfortable and just passed out, the other hand curled in what you recognize to be the green sweater you'd worn the weekend before you left.
It's been almost two weeks since you were last home, and his hair in disarray across the forrest green from where the sweater lies under his head, something so innocent and commonplace that feels like a tire iron swinging in to your chest. Toeing off your shoes, you pull the quilt back until you can crawl over him, caging his body between your arms and legs.
He wakes up slowly, murmuring wordlessly as you tongue at the piercings decorating his left ear, pressed close enough that you can relish in the warmth that he's radiating. One hand slips down the front of his horrible purple plaid pajama bottoms, cupping his half-heard length while you scrape your teeth down the pale column of his neck.
By the time his eyes shutter open, he's already pressing up against the loose hold you have of him, hands coming up to flex convulsively against your shoulders. "You're late," he groans, voice thick with sleep and rough with pleasure, and the sound of it, not obscured or lessened over the phone, sends shivers down your spine.
"My flight got delayed," you answer, rubbing your thumb against the tip on the upstroke, and he squeezes his eyes shut again as he thrusts up against the motion, pinning your hand between his hips and yours, and it's a struggle you don't exactly win to try not to grind him back down in to the sheets.
His breathing is heavy as he slowly undoes every button on your shirt, pressing wet, lingering kisses to each plastic circle before fitting it through the hole, and it's absolute torture to feel his mouth so close to your skin but still separated by layers of fabric. He fights with the stupid plastic belt buckle you wear so you don't have to take it on and off every time you go through security, but soon enough you're left in just your socks and your watch.
It's not the frenzied pace that sometimes comes roaring to life when you crash in to each other, teeth biting and hands scratching, once you come home from a trip, but there's no lack of passion in it. He's pressed against every inch of you, tangled in your legs, clutching your fingers in his, breathing your air as you move, and never once does he close his eyes. He bites his lip, tosses his head, kisses the sweat beading at your hairline, but seems entranced by the look of pleasure twisting your features.
Stiffening under you, toes curling in the bedsheets as his hands clench tight, so good tight, at your hair, he whispers your name so softly, so reverently as he comes all over your hand that there is literally nothing you can do to keep from hurtling over the edge after him. Like floating in warm waves, you come back to yourself, still on top of him, but with his arms tight around your torso and his nose against your collarbone, dangerously close to your armpits, and you've both been sweating under the quilt on top of the fact that you've spent almost all day in an airport.
"You're absolutely disgusting."
"Don't care," he says petulantly, following you when you try and move away. "Missed this. Missed you."
His breath against your skin, the slow inhales and exhales through his nose that is the single sensation you attribute to your relationship, feels so much like home, so much like Eridan that you can't bring yourself to do much more than roll over half heartedly and let him settle as he pleases, dirty and too hot but happier than you'd ever been in your five-star hotel last week.
Even though he has his own, he always steals your scarfs.
He doesn't like the way the cold wind stings his nose when he shovels the driveway, and you suppose if he's going to be breathing through a layer of fleece or yarn, it might as well smell like you. It has long been an accepted fact that anything, absolutely anything, that you purchase to wear is at some time going to end up on his person. You tease him about it, have since the first time he returned your borrowed coat after pressing his face to it one last time (of course, he hadn't thought you were paying attention), but it means affection, it means happy, it means I love you, you strange creature, even if you take all my clothes and fuss when I come home from trips and smell like the hotel and not me.
So although the bright orange scarf you originally bought to wear when trekking from your office to the parking garage after dark looks absolutely garish against his plum overcoat, he seems much more perturbed with the ice that keeps slipping him up on the little pathway that leads to the front door. He always shovels the walkway, saying that since you're the only person who has to get dressed and leave the house for work (he's made it full time as an author now, and is notorious for laying around in your shirts and pajama bottoms and scribbling in notebooks instead of on his computer like a sensible person), so he might as well do something to make your life a little easier.
He's exhaling warm air on to his fingers as best he can through the thick material of the scarf, and you just shake your head as you stick a mug of milk in the microwave (because he only drinks hot chocolate made with milk). It's a familiar sight, and you're surprised that he's kept it up as long as the two of you have lived here, because after the first time he slipped and nearly knocked himself unconscious on the porch you expected him to storm in, throw the shovel at you, and never set foot outside again unless there was no snow to be seen. Even so, he gets up at the same time as you and bitches and moans and puts his boots on over his pajamas and stomps down the hall and bangs the door loud enough that you can hear it in the shower with the water running.
And every day, you're waiting for him with a mug of hot chocolate with just a dash of cinnamon, which he warms his frozen fingers against and tucks against you on the couch while you watch the morning news, snowball nose tucked against your neck and breathing you in, out, in, out, always, and forever.