Sometimes the memories come at the strangest times.
She'd expected them in the night, when the black velvet darkness wrapped her in dreams, when her mind let go and her body was set free to cry out for his. Then they'd come slowly, night-phantoms drawn from the realms of her remembrances, gentle touches flowing and fusing and filling her with a longing that woke her to the shadows, made her reach for him in a confusion of loneliness.
And in the adrenalin-rush of a slay, he was there. In the secret pleasure she finds in the strength of her body, lithe and quick, in the flash of fists and fangs, the skill of the kill, the heat and sweat and keen quickening of blood, the thrill she'd denied but he saw in her, he'd understood. Then she'd wish him back, wish him with her, to fight alongside and against, to be friend, foe, fighter, dancer, demon, man, lover?
When she came to England she knew they?d be there, that she'd hear his voice reflected in the accents that surrounded her each day, that the sound would turn each half-glimpse of a form, each suggestion of a shadow, into a fleeting burst of breathtaking hope, there and gone, but leaving its echoes to touch her with sadness.
But sometimes the memories came where she least expected them, and caught her breath, her heart, her soul.
Like today.
Sitting in the summer warmth of Giles' garden, languorous in the shade of the old apple trees, sleepy in the silence touched with crystal birdsong and the heavy buzz of black and bronze bumble bees. At peace, her mind meandering lazily over nothing in particular, she watches the dragonflies hunt in a patch of sunlight, skimming over the long meadow grass, catching rainbows from the air in the prisms of paper-dry wings. She sees a butterfly delicate in shades of gold and brown, resting from its dance on a purple-blushed orchid, open its wings to a dapple of liquid light.
She reaches toward it, and the sun touches her hand with a flare of gold, flame-bright and bedazzling to her shade-sensitive eyes, and she sees another time, another flame. She is filled with the memory of fear and sacrifice and love and loss. She looks down at her left hand, at the smooth, fire-scarred surface of her palm, draws the memory tight around her and sits on, frozen in the summer heat.
He comes from the cool shadows to wrap his arms around her, risking the shafts of sunlight sparking through the trees to hold her. Her raises her hand to press shadow-cool lips against the scars, to bring her to life.
She smiles into eyes bluer than the English skies, warmer than the summer sun, slips into an embrace that always feels like coming home.
He presses his lips to her hair and purrs, "Chasin' butterflies, pet?"
"Not any more," she says as her lips find his and she pulls him down into the tangled grass, among the soft green scents, beneath the canopy of apple-jewelled trees, where new memories ease the pain of old.
Author's Chapter Notes:
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