A/N Stuck in the mud on WPtH Yuck

I have an idea to turn this thoughtful ficlet (that I came up with when I was too hot cuddling my husband. Well as hot as a british summer night gets :) into a proper B/S story. What you think?

Thanks to April for doing her grammar thing, i tried out some semi colons on my own and she say's I got them right so i'm very proud of myself.

Hope you enjoy

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She rolls away from him, sleepily disentangling herself from his arms to lie in dreaming isolation across an impassable ocean of linen. He doesn't pull her back into his embrace or flow with her in the perfect synchronicity of sleeping lovers, just sighs and rolls onto his back to contemplate the shadowed ceiling and listen to the faint, muffled sound of her breathing.

He used to try to hold her, keep her safely cocooned in his arms, pull her close against his broad chest and share the air she breathed. She would hold still for a few moments, just long enough so as not to be hurtful, then slip across the bed, spreading her heated skin against the cool cotton of their sheets and mumbling that it was too hot. Even now, in these cool Californian winter nights she shrugs off his embrace, shying away from the sticky contact of his warm body, to throw one leg wantonly out from under the covers and let the cold night air caress her skin. Only then is she able to sleep.

By day their relationship is perfection itself. They walk together in the sun; she smiles up at him, that devastatingly radiant smile that is her signature and her gift. She holds his hand, stands on her tiptoes to brush her lips against his. She slips her deceptively frail arms around his waist and lays her head on his chest when they dance. But by night she is a stranger to him. She hunts alone; it's new. He used walk beside her, but now he hasn't the strength. Despite his size, despite that he works out every day, despite that he has two centuries of fighting experience, he is fragile. In her dark and violent world he is weak and breakable and so she shields him from her world, and hunts alone.

She slips into their bed when her hunt is finished and kisses him with a grave and studied gentleness. Often they make love, but it lacks the playful affection of their afternoon communions. There is a guarded melancholy to her, a latent sadness that pervades her nights. At night, she is a stranger to him.

Sleep eludes him, as it always does when she distances herself from him. He wonders if perhaps it is at night that she thinks of another, of one whose chilled embrace would cool her fiery skin. If perhaps the night air's chill is to her a ghostly reminiscence of that icy lover’s touch. He feels his brow crease with the thought. No. If she dreams of cold dead skin it is his own, it is a dream of a different time when love was new and she was innocence itself, of a long forgotten world where demons she faced where not her own.

He sighs and runs a large hand across his face, feeling the now familiar warmth of his own breath. It is strange how in two hundred years of death he never quite got used to the redundancy of breathing, but in less than a year of life he has completely forgotten how it felt to not need air.

Perhaps that is the cause of her withdrawal; maybe it is at night that she feels most strongly that they are different. He is certainly aware of her unnaturalness. She is too strong; he knows that she must temper the power of her tiny body in order to make love with him. She is too fast; just yesterday she caught a glass that he had clumsily knocked from the kitchen table, with a preternatural speed that had been at best disconcerting. He feels his understanding of her shadowy world slip away from him day by day. He remembers that there was a time when he had understood, when her nature had been a lustrous reflection of his own, but he feels that kinship diminish with every caress of warm sunlight on his skin.

It is not that he loves her any less; he loves her perhaps more now than he ever has. But he is also aware that, for all that love, they are not a pair. They are too different and his skin is too warm for her to bear.

She mumbles something in her sleep, so softly his dull human ears cannot be sure of what he hears, but he imagines it is a name - a name that neither of them will utter in the daylight. She never speaks his name, perhaps because she never thinks of him. She certainly never loved him; he is past now and far from her thoughts. He hopes this is the reason, but suspects it is not. He has his own reasons for avoiding the other’s name. He hates to lie to her, and any mention of him would be a lie: a good lie, if there can be such a thing, but a lie nonetheless. There is guilt, too, a feeling that his silence is a betrayal of the other. It is not, of course; he swore when they parted that he would keep his secret, yet he knows his motives for keeping that promise are not noble and so he avoids his name just as she does.

He rolls away from her, pulling the cover over his shoulder so that it lifts from the bed, allowing cool air to flow between them. She murmurs again and this time he is sure it is a name. Perhaps it is time to break his oath and his silence, to tell her what she has always had a right to know. Perhaps tomorrow, when they wake together in the sunlight, he will tell her. Perhaps.





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