"Words"

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Author's notes: This is the first thing that I've written in a long long while, so be gentle with me. ;) All flames will be used to toast marshmallows. With thanks to Jen for being just as writer's blocked as I was, and for generally being wonderful. I am saying this because she told me to put this up of course, so feel free to blame her for this and spam her inbox with hate mail – but that's not before you've read and told her how much you loved "Bad Luck Day."

Summary: JC/AL: Because sometimes words aren't enough.

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The most important things are always the hardest things to say.

In Zen, they don't believe that words can ever fully describe something; the description always ends up leaving something wanting. Words are just tools of communication, the important things, the things that matter in life, seem too fragile to be confined to words; words shrink things that seemed limitless.

He still wakes up even now and has to assure himself that she's there, lying next to him, making him wish that he'd been a painter, or a sculptor instead of a doctor, because there aren't medical terms, there aren't any words for that, for the curve of her hip, her coxal, and the lines of her legs and the shape of her against him.

It's about those moments where nothing is more important than the way their mouths fit together or the way her fingers tangle in his.

Words are meaningless.

In life, people never talk about the givens, the things that are too normal, too regular to be discussed, because words would be redundant. They're spoken in different ways already, like the way her toothbrush is next to his in the mornings and at night, or the way she wears his sweaters to sleep, the way he has to touch her to make sure she's real when he wakes up.

So he never said, "love" not for a long time, because it would be describing the weather in Chicago as windy, talking about Weaver as controlling, or bringing up gravity.

But there are parts of him that needs to hear her say it, because he doesn't think he'd believe it otherwise. Like a scientist needing proof, he longs to have the evidence, conclusively, that she loves him.

But she never uses words; she's economical with everything she says, as though if she were to just say everything that were to come into her head she might give away some deep dark secret. Instead, she kisses him when she means to ask how he is, she squeezes his hand when he's feeling lonely; the way she's always there when he wakes up.

Because, sometimes there aren't words for the important things between people. Sometimes words aren't enough.