Just one of a few morsels clogging my brand new hard drive. Not an optimistic work, to be sure.

Dedicated to Silversurf4, who keeps this category alive and does so with startling talent. Please visit her profile and prepare to be awed...

Capsize

He's not convinced that she sees him.

The physical connection is a sullen intimacy. A barrier remains; no longer partners and perhaps this matters. Too many anonymous others before him and even in these heated moments he thinks there will be others after him.

Forever is not on their schedule.

It's not how he imagined this, when he stretched out his optimism to hold the hand of impossibility. Where once their conflicting spirits brushed together in coordination, they should have achieved a fusing of souls through the union. Nothing is so permanent as a mistake and as he brings her to a scream, it is regrettable. It should be a softer sigh, a completion that mends, that binds. But satisfaction always rips a tortured path from her lungs, flavoring the air on which he suffocates.

It's all wrong.

He's careful not to see his past in her face but that doesn't quell comparisons in the quiet hours. It had been sweet with the one who'd worn his ring. It had been unfulfilled temptation with his pantsuit savior. And his own legion of the faceless had usually been accompanied by giggles and playfulness.

This one races to a primal finish, ushering the moving on.

She will leave him behind. He knows this. And there's not enough Zen to swallow the fact. He has little choice but to let her break him, the sole collaborative act they've managed. Someone else watches her back now, a novice she's meant to teach. Which is work she surely takes home with her.

Pain is the only part he's permitted to play.

In the end, the fight for freedom has only won him entrapment. And in submission something vital in him has been voluntary misplaced. What is absent wears outdated labels; pride, respect and he barely remembers owning them. Yet she is no mystery, ever lost and ever angry. And it infects him too, a buried ember stirring to life in her breeze.

The old rages have a new target, but never when she's close enough to strike. It would be easy, wounding her. Simply refusing her would make an impact from which neither might recover. In daylight, in the solitude of jobless wealth, the rationale that the balance of time remains to soften her is a ready shield against despair.

He can fix her. He's done it before. But who is more broken?

It is possible to drown on dry land, to flail in the diverted river until grief fills the lungs. Regardless of how far he throws the rope, she rebuffs the salvation and pours amber hatred down her throat even as she chokes on the poison kiss. He has so much more to give but her capacity to receive sinks deeper each time the moon returns.

Blinking into lazy twilight, she moves to slip from his grasp. To run from his sight. Because the sun won't be far behind and if she can evade its rays, she will be invisible. The slickness of her thigh is a curse on his skin, the summer in the room no longer a comfortable womb but a stifling humidity.

He's not convinced that she sees him. But even in darkness he recognizes her.

She tries to rise and take her winter with her but he's always been too fiery to be complacent for long. Arms tighten around her waist and the hold that stills her is victory. Without speaking he has announced his intention for the morning and his captive is too worn to lift weapons against the call. The onslaught is a dismissal of duty, a rejection of his assigned role.

Combat is rarely a study in tenderness.

She will leave him behind. He knows this. What he wants she does not give. What he takes she does not offer. What he wins she does not lament.

Afterward, when the fire dies she departs. No closer to his and further from herself. A coupling committed in desperation only widens the fractures and now, despite the force of damning sunlight blinding, his view has become unobstructed. The sustenance of the past will not feed the future. They cannot have forever when they don't have now.

She does not see him. He cannot fix her.

He will leave her to capsize.