birds beneath my window dusting their wings upon the lawn. Characters: Aidan Graveley/Anubis (gravedirt) & Aria Dixon/Euterpe (museicalme) Date/Time: Last week, during spring break. Location: Montenegro mountain, at a rented cabin. Rating/Warnings: PG-13 for possible language? Summary: A glimpse of their ski trip.
It was difficult, as it always was.
Dating, that is. It was like dusting out an old and creaking attic, limbering up ancient and disused muscles atrophied from long rest. He struggled to remember how to make romantic gestures, how to behave like something even vaguely approximating boyfriend material, how to prop open the metaphorical door and let another person into his life. The god of embalming was chill and cold, quick to laugh and smile, but slow to thaw and become truly warm and lively. Instead, he was the wry voice in the corner, the aloof spectator. He opted to watch life through a lens, capturing it in his camera and processing it in clinical, detached terms, stripped bare and laid before him in a law textbook.
But he liked Aria. And the rest of February hadn't gone precisely as planned -- school had tightened its clutches and whisked him off, leaving them unable to address the 'kind of sort of exploring this option' thing they had going on. So instead of taking the legal internship over spring break (she'd made noises once she heard of it, but he simply waved the prospect off; you can't really pick up that much experience in one week anyway, I'll do a proper one in the summer), Aidan chose to whisk his baffled California girl up into the mountains, to a rented cabin and a warm wood fire and two pairs of skis.
That was romantic, wasn't it? It was a Gesture™. That was the intent. And in another sense that he couldn't quite articulate -- and wouldn't even try, their long drive instead consisting of easy conversation and jokes -- it was important to him. He was at home with winter, in the mountains and by himself, with the silent trees and black sky. This was a side of him that any prospective girlfriend would have to know and understand, in order to untangle the mess that was Aidan Graveley. It was the young man who walked the Black Wood by himself despite its unnerving reputation, the one who erred towards solitude.
And despite all that, she was livening up the surroundings. Aidan found himself laughing more often, giving in to his tongue-in-cheek mischief that he so carefully monitored whenever he was on-campus and in official RA & TA mode. They made hot cocoa. They literally roasted marshmallows. They struggled to assemble a smore (he was terrible at it).
Even sharing the bed went surprisingly smooth. He hadn't made a move on her, nor she on him -- but neither of them took the sofabed in the living room, either. The result was difficult to categorise, for a man who loved neat categories: they were hovering on the brink of that 'something more'. More physical closeness than he was accustomed to. More flirtation than he was accustomed to.
And then, of course, there was the morning that he slowly woke up to find Aria burrowed into his side. Aidan blinked a few times, bleary and groggy, staring up at the chill white light filtering in through the cabin windows -- and then suddenly realised she had nuzzled her way up to him, seeking heat (he exuded heat like a human radiator). He froze, arms rigid, pondering how to safely untangle himself from the pile of limbs and blankets. This was the second time in a couple months that he'd --
No. He couldn't think about that. Not now.
It was nice, Aidan could admit. The steady rise-and-fall of her breath and her black hair curled across his pillow, her arm splayed over him. Not his girlfriend, then. But getting closer than before.
More to the point, though: how in the world could he extricate himself without waking her?