Author's Note:

It has been an extraordinary length of time since I've written in this fandom. I couldn't make this leave my head and I don't know how it ended up there in the first place.

It's extravagantly romantic, which I love, and I hope you enjoy it. It's also heavily influence by Wuthering Heights - I quote shamelessly - which is extravagantly romantic itself.

Disclaimer: I own nothing aside from the (non-existant and fluff-heavy plot). I make no monetary gain from this.

She had always liked snow, the way it gathered in little piles in the corners of the windows and caught the webs of spiders in a frozen glister. What had started out as a fluttering against the velvet of the winter's night before had now grown into a veritable storm, throwing itself lustily against the windows of their home, filling the leaden panes. It had blanketed their estate, gathering atop the head stones and benches in the cemetery, and rested like frozen velvet across the gravel of their drive.

In the early hours, when sleep had proved elusive, she had tasked Lurch to labour over the fire that now fought valiantly against the drafts and gusts that blew through the cracks. The logs would fall occasionally, sparking onto the heavy stone grate, and she would resent the intrusion into her world. But mostly it offered comfort in this vast, beautiful world of cold. There was something melancholy about snow; something desperately sad and painful about the way it covered everything and froze the very earth to stone.

For this feeling she would have foregone hours of sleep.

Behind her, drawing her attention away from the spectacle of nature taking place on the other side of the glass, the door to the parlour squealed open. She pulled her eyes away to stare at the figure in the door. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his dressing gown, obscured then by the thick velvet of the material, and his face wore an entertained smile.

"How long have you been-?"

"Shhh," she motioned to her husband, "Please don't break the silence."

He smiled indulgently and came towards her, a little bob of his head sealing his agreement to her request. Pushing against her shoulder gently he motioned her to move along the velvet window seat, holding up the heavy fur blanket so he might slide under it. When he had done so he pulled her back, so she rested against his chest and sat between his legs. Then, as naturally as everything between them, he rested his chin on her head and she twisted her head to settle on his chest.

She wondered then at the heat of his body, the solid and safe way in which he enveloped her easily and effortlessly. The thrumming confidence of his heart under his breast plate was a symphony. She thought of the night before, when she slid across the dark satin of their sheets and sought the warmth only he could give her. She had rested her head on his chest and listened intently to the sound.

"What are you doing querida?" He had asked, that little tingle of amusement lacing his voice.

She had tipped her chin up to stare through the opaque darkness, the only light the burning tip of his cigar, and said quietly:

"Listening to your heart."

He chuckled again and she knew what he was thinking. When he did the self-same thing to her there was no noise to be found, no thrum of a driving heartbeat. They often joked about her heart and his woeful attempt to locate any noise under the breastplate and marble skin. He would lie at night for hours, his ear pressed to her bare skin, demanding her silence so he might hear it. Little did he know it rested in his chest, and beat in time with his, and that was why he would never hear it.

In the present she tipped her mouth up to catch his jaw bone, to place a kiss there against his freshly shaven skin. There was nothing in this morning which spoke of desperation and feral instinct. He tipped his head to kiss her, wordless as he did so, though she felt words on his mouth and in his hands.

"Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us…"

The words left her mouth of their own volition, echoing through the parlour. She felt his smile against her ear and she was pleased as he was that these words assaulted her with their honesty. She loved language, she loved the breadth of its complicity in her need to convey what she felt. She had always been far more comfortable using other's language rather than her own though and these words had always been so apt for them.

"Snow always brings out the darkness in you," he whispered into her hair, and his voice was breathless, "Had I been a rogue, a vagabond with a vicious temper, would you love me still?"

She nodded once because it was rhetorical question by its nature. It needed no answer.

She would have loved him no matter his cruelty or his kindness.

"Do you know where my heart is Gomez?"

"No," with two deft, solicitous fingers he trailed the loose sleeve of her night gown down to reveal her shoulder. His warm lips kissed the skin there, trailing their way up to her neck.

"It is in your chest, beside your heart," she let him tilt her head forward, shivered as he pulled her hair and piled it onto her head and trailed kisses down the nape of her neck.

"Will I have your heart forever?"

He stopped to ask her and supressing a moan, she nodded again.

"A woman of few words," he whispered.

Settling again he pulled her to rest against his chest and let her hair fall back into place. Still her shoulder was exposed to the coldness of the parlour but he had stopped for now. She could not decide whether she was pleased by this or not; she supposed this, for once, was not the place nor the time but the little twinge of frustration that he had created in her refused to dissipate.

"What do you want for Christmas?"

"Mmmmm…." She shook her head, "I have everything I could want. I want for nothing."

"But, if you could have anything?"

He tightened his grip around her waist.

"Then I would want forever, eternity, with you," she said simply, eyes flittering all at once across the virginal landscape.

"If I could grant you that, I would," he said with all the solemnity of a prayer.

She felt a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

"Then grant me forever as it is on this earth," she whispered.

"This rogue…this vagabond swears," she felt, under her back, his hand pressing against his heart in a vow.

"What do you want?"

"Everything I want, could want, I have," he paused, "Perhaps more of you, all of you, all of the time."

"Then," she said dryly, "You never ask for much."

She felt, rather than saw, his rakish grin, "No, never."

"Only my soul, my youth, my old age," she smiled, her voice slick with jest, "My…body."

"Your glorious body," he tightened his grip around his waist to emphasise his correction, "You are very…"

"Yes?"

She awaited his comment with the knowledge that it would be an analysis of her candid manner, so rare as to be a precious jewel.

"I…" she felt his chest reverberate in a self-conscious chuckle.

Here all pretences were scattered to the wind and they pulled on honesty as an intimate thing to wear in front of, and only for, each other.

"You are going to say I'm being unusually wistful, aren't you?"

"Unusually…warm," he countered, the whisper of his words sending hot shivers across the skin of her neck.

"Always for you," she said, the arch and subtext of her words not escaping him.

He breathed a chuckle that was dark and unnerving.

"Maybe it's this weather," she mused quietly, taking his hand from her waist and lacing it with hers, "Maybe I feel old. Maybe, maybe sometimes I need to tell you."

"Morticia," she could hear the sincerity in his voice, the way his words curled around her name as if it were both sacred and terrible, "Morticia, you always tell me."

"Then perhaps I felt the need to be more vocal," she laughed gently, "I am more a woman of…action."

"I married you precisely because of that," he chucked, "Don't go changing on me now Tish."

"Too long in the habit, I'm afraid," she said, mocking sincerity.

"Well my love there is no accounting for taste," he pushed her hair aside again and his teeth were on her neck, divesting gentle bites on the pale flesh, "And…mmmm, you taste delicious."

"You have an unusual pallet," she smiled.

"Expensive taste," he laughed against her neck.

"We should... move," she whispered noncommittally.

"Why?"

She leaned her head back, countering her words. He pressed his nose to her hair.

"You are happy here, you are content," his arms closed around her waist again, pulling her tighter against him, "As am I. Why move? What need?"

"What need then, for anything but each other, let's never move Gomez."

She felt his smile again, and his words more than she saw or heard:

"If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave."

The snow was white, gathering at the edges and closing in on their world. Above them the children stirred, their feet on the stairs then in the hall, but they stayed where they were in the silence and eternity of the morning.