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DISCLAIMER: Nope, not mine.
SUMMARY: Nikia wakes up. Set in LFN3
WORDCOUNT: 534
DEDICATION: For Monique, who asked for Nikita/Michael
FORGETS
by Leni
It's a rush when she wakes up, a thousand needles poking her body at once in that
second when she doesn't remember if her bed was just hers tonight. It's the space between
belief and dream, reality and whatever they create when they out of Section. Out of
cammeras. Out of life itself.
For a moment she doesn't want to open her eyes, doesn't dare to touch the space beside
her. In that moment she doesn't remember that he wouldn't be there anyway, that the only
time when she's allowed to touch him is when the sun is out, when he comes and opens her
door with his key and stands there, so calm, until she pulls him inside. Into her
apartment, into her life, into this sliver of a normal affair that is everything but
normal. Everything but what it's supposed to be.
But it's all they can have, and some part of her clings to that even as she forgets that
he has always woken up long before her, and that even though she has learned to wake up
when the cat enters through the window, she still sleeps comfortably as his arms
disentangle from her waist, and his legs leave hers lonely and bare. She has attuned her everything
to the beep of her phone, but his goodbye kiss - long and deep and a memory just in case -
just manages to make her fall deeper into slumber, dreams filled with the taste that is
him and the subconscious knowledge that he doesn't want to go. Not really. Because nobody
kisses as long and deep if they really meant goodbye.
In that minute she dreams that she isn't afraid not to find him at her side, terrified if
she did. Her mind takes her to a place where his body against her after dawn isn't a
mistake, a weakness everybody will prey on. She thinks for an instant that she has the
right to demand that he stayed, that he woke her up and made love to her until she craved
breakfast more than him. Which, feeling as much as she does, may never happen.
In that minute she forgets that she is betraying him with every non-word she doesn't say.
She forgets that her return to Section is a decoy, that her mission includes lying to the
man in her dreams, the companion in her bed. She forgets everything but the absence of his
heat at her side, and how she misses him, and how she would love to open her eyes and look
into his.
But that's a fairytale, not even a dream for dreams are refuge and her little fairytale
would only destroy her, them. He's been gone long before dawn and he left her tangled in
the sheets that still smell like him, like them. He probably locked the door behind him,
using his key, and forgot to close the shower curtain. Again.
In that second between sleepy forgetfulness and forced wakefulness, she wishes with all
her might that she could call him on it. But she can't, because once she opens her eyes
she has to pretend he was never in her bed at all.
The End
06/02/05
Feedback
is welcome.
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