The moment Matt was expecting, the moment Lydia would come back to herself and pull away, never came. Instead, something shifted, and she folded herself into him the same way she used to, soft and fierce all at once. Amazing how such a small movement could feel so seismic. For Matt, it was everything. The sign he was waiting for, though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant.
Something was changing, though. He knew that much. She should’ve broken the kiss by now – that was her MO, after all, hers and Leia’s. Give in for a minute, slap it away the next. He was used to that. Wasn’t as much fun as it had been back in the old days, but still, he knew how to handle that particular scenario. This one was… different. Confusing. But he was pretty sure he could handle it, just as long as it didn’t stop.
So he wasn’t going to let it stop.
Matt opened his mouth to her, breathing in more of Lydia than the air around him. He could no longer smell the baked stone scent of the desert or the stale tang of the Falcon. There was only Lydia. The delicate notes of her shampoo filled his senses as her hair fell against his face, and he breathed in deeper instead of brushing it aside and smelled – rain? Had it been raining in England when she left? Probably; it was winter and the rain never stopped, yet another reason Matt avoided Camelot headquarters whenever he could help it. A cloudy sky always made him feel claustrophobic. A cloudy sky within stone walls was even worse.
With Lydia, though, it hadn’t been so bad. The quiet days between missions weren’t reprieves for Matt, not at first. Peace got under his skin the same way being grounded did, made him anxious and unable to sit still. Only Lydia could bring him back to himself, sometimes with a word, sometimes with the slightest touch. Only Lydia reminded him that those days in between the danger weren’t just a holding period, but an opportunity to breathe. And live. Really live.
Matt could remember exactly the last time he felt this alive. The last night, before the last mission, before the last fight. Since then, he’d barely been alive at all.
His body responded to her touch, saying all the things he could never put in words, pushing forward to press against her now instead of leaning back. The hand on her back slid down to her upper thigh and held on tight, while the other stayed firmly embedded at the back of her neck, fingers twining through her hair as he kissed her with everything he had. Matt’s hesitation was all but gone, replaced by urgency. He never wanted to let her go. How had he done that before? She had to know that he was sorry. She had to know that he loved her still. She had to –
"Anybody home? Yo if there's a dead body in here I'm not cleaning it up!"
Shock at hearing Gabe’s voice echo through the Falcon broke them apart. For a moment, Matt stared blankly, incapable of processing this extremely catastrophic interruption. This couldn't be happening, not when they were so close to...
Then the moment passed.
“I’m gonna kill him,” Matt growled under his breath.
And then, still holding on to Lydia, not looking at her, because looking at her meant acknowledging that the moment was over and they couldn’t get it back, he shouted over her shoulder, “Everything’s fine here! Go away now!" He cleared his throat, as if that would correct his slightly hysterical tone of voice, and added for good measure, "You take one more step on this ship, Martinez, and the only dead body you’ll be cleaning up is your own!”