Love drips into my soul, and each drop corrodes me.
I lie here, in the time between waking and sleep, while the night breathes around me, and I can feel myself - lessen.
He lies beside me, sleeping now, curled in the blankets like a child, his face as innocent of thought and planning and worry as I will ever see it. It is only in this time, the between-time, that I see him without the visor or those ruby-quartz glasses. Without them, he seems softer, younger, ever more in need of care.
I will always care.
And it is killing me.
He lives inside my head now, linked to me with psionic bonds so deep and intertwined I sometimes think that if they cut open my brain they will find the threads that bind us, soul to soul. Our thoughts echo each other, his, mine, an overlap of remembering, thinking, until I am not sure what is me anymore and what is him.
It is only in the now-time, the between-time, when he sleeps and I lie staring into the dark, that I know what is the I inside. Only now are these thoughts my thoughts, only my thoughts, only me.
It would all be so much easier if I didn't love him till it ached inside of me. If my breath didn't catch in my throat when I look at him, if my heart didn't skip when he speaks my name, if my body didn't flame when he touches me. If I didn't want to share my heart, my body, my thoughts, my life, my soul with him.
But I do.
It would be so easy if I didn't. I could leave him, walk away, rip the psionic link between us out by the roots and leave him numbed and broken as I walked out into a life that was only mine, was wholly mine. But we are so - us - now, that to leave him broken would break me, too.
I don't know what makes me more afraid - the thought of leaving him or the thought of staying.
One would break me, tear me into little bits and make me weep until the end of days. And the other eats me away, piece by piece, until there will be no me to break anymore.
Even now, I am slipping away from myself. I used to do this every night, the between-time, the me-time, but it has grown less as time goes by. Every night became every second night, every third, every week, until now I am barely able to snatch one night per month when I can be only me. And it used to be hours, time enough to truly grasp myself and what I am when the night embraced me, time enough to hold onto me.
But he knows.
Even in his sleep, he knows.
He grows restless when he sleeps, rises from the darkness and wakes, and when he does, he is back again, he is inside me, and I have to shut down the me that is and become the us that is. And then he pulls me down with him into the little death of sleep and I lose myself again, my soul slipping away from me until I dream dreams where I run and run but cannot catch that which I need to live.
It used to take hours before he knew I was awake beside him, hours where I could explore the landscape of my mind as if it were a stranger's and, thus, come to know myself. Now I am lucky if I have twenty minutes when I am alone in the dark with only myself for company.
Twenty minutes once a month.
Can you keep your soul alive and whole if you only have twenty minutes once a month?
I doubt it.
I doubt I will have another year before I have forgotten who I am.
But I will never leave him.
He is wondrous to me.
In battle, in practice, sometimes I forget entirely where I am and feel a startling thump in my chest as I watch him move, turn, sway, drop, kick. I feel like a little girl with a crush on some unattainable hero as I see him move so lithely, a smooth, balletic grace behind each deliberate, intelligent move. And then I remember - he fights for me - and I can feel my heart dancing in my chest. And later, in the firelight, the candle-light, when he slips from his uniform and stands before me - skin as smooth as silk and honey, muscles sliding beneath that skin like water, his face a paean of love and desire, his eyes ever a mystery - then I burn for him, lust like flames inside of me, until he takes me into his arms and possesses me utterly.
And when he talks to us, his X-Men, his team, I sometimes find myself listening, not to the words, but to the heart beneath the words and I know that I have a man who is good and true and brave and strong, who will not shirk the fight because it makes him unpopular or an outlaw, but who will go forth into the darkness that is the war we are fighting for our own survival and try to light the way into the future with the flame that is the courage in his own true and steady heart.
But when I listen to his words, I marvel, for he is a leader of men, an inspirer of others with his own quiet wisdom, his passionate devotion to the dream. But more than that - he is an intelligent, thoughtful man, able to use his natural gifts to analyse information, to plan, to decide, to become more than just another X-Man, but to be a leader of X-Men.
He is the fire that lights my days and sears my nights.
If I had my own choice, I would leave him tomorrow.
But I do not have my own choices any more. His love, his need, have taken those choices away from me, have made me into half of him, the half that binds him together. For despite everything my love has, despite all his gifts and talents, despite the hard work that he puts into ever being more, he lacks one thing.
He lacks faith in himself.
I am his faith in himself.
As long as I am with him, as long as I believe and love and let him dwell within the chambers of my mind, then he is whole and strong.
Without me, he is nothing.
With him, I am nothing.
They told me, he told me, what happened when I was not, when he thought that I had died. Insanity was one word for it, madness another, random acts of self-destruction were the symptom and my absence was the cause. I could never impose that on him again and so I lose the only choice I have.
For three pillars have held my love in stability and sanity and faith - the Professor, the X-Men, and I. The Professor is gone now, taken by = others after trying to kill us. The X-Men - fragile they are becoming, alliances and enmities shifting the balance between us, until they cannot be relied upon. And so I am the only constant in his world, the only thing that holds him and, consequently, the X-Men together.
And so I smile and let him inside my head and don't even whimper as he takes another part of my soul away from me.
He's stirring now, beside me, and in the depths of my mind I can hear the whisper, not yet coherent, not yet thought, but him, inside me, always inside me. Soon he will wake and then, again, I will slip away.
I remember loneliness.
I remember the time before I was a telepath, when there were no voices in my head and I would - sometimes - ache with loneliness, wanting someone with me, someone who understood, who could read my thoughts and always - always - knew what I wanted them to know. And then my power manifested and there were always other people's thoughts in my head and yet I could, still, be lonely, because even though their thoughts were in my head, mine were not in theirs and I could be alone in the knowledge that no-one else understood me.
But now he is in my head, always, and there is no part of me he doesn't understand and he always knows what I am thinking. And I can put up the strongest shields I have, put all my power together to create shields that no thought can penetrate, and still he is there, on the inside, in the spaces in my mind and nothing can make him go away and leave me alone and I cannot even let him know that I would ever want to be alone and at times like this I would sell my soul for the loneliness.
He stirs again, rolls over, his hand groping outwards blindly to find me and the whisper-thought in my mind is stronger and I do not want him to be inside my mind and so I clasp his hand and wrap it around me and curl down into his soft and sleeping embrace and prepare to sleep.
So little time he leaves me now, so little time to be me. Soon there will be no time, no between-time, and there will no longer be a me, only us, only ever us, only always us.
I hate him.
I love him.
He is eating me alive.
The End