Polarity
Summary: Seven years in exile creates some strange bedfellows.
Characters: Harren, Dalby
Codes: Harren/Dalby
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Paramount. Imagination belongs to me.
Notes: This was a "guess who?" story inspired by the VAMB "Guess the Pairing" challenges. but I've now listed the pairing.
Rated M
I tell him, “We have nothing in common,” and he laughs.
He claims that laying waste to a theory is not so different to slaughtering men for revenge. He says that I’m as angry as he ever was, that both of us wanted something from life that was destroyed at the hands of others. He tells me that the only difference between us is that he’s learned to hide his fury better.
He pushes me against the wall, hard hands flaying the uniform from me, breath harsh in my ear as he takes me. “You spend too much time locked away with your damn equations,” he hisses. “What are they telling you now?”
Dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe, the flying apart of things that circle each other in frightened orbit.
In the end, all we can do is hang on for the ride.
We don’t cuddle afterwards; it’s not what we’re about. In any case, whatever kindness existed in him was shattered into pieces when he found the broken body of his wife, used and discarded by scale-skinned murderers. He became a different person that day, his mettle melted to its purest form and fired in the kiln of his hatred.
It may be the thing I most admire about him, and if I’m honest, the thing I most relate to. I pursue purity in the form of elegant and complex mathematics; he exists in a state of uncomplicated lust for vengeance.
But he sees it as a state of entropy, the universal tendency toward destruction. I see it as a quest for truth.
Perhaps that’s why, in the end, what he really wants to do is break me.
He thrusts inside me and the redshift behind my eyes warns me that, too soon, I’ll fly apart and become nothing but my constituent atoms, scattered throughout a random and uncaring universe. We polarise with accelerating velocity, and I clutch at his hand. My anchor. My cosmological constant.
There’s a beauty in destruction. His craving for annihilation is personal, mine theoretical, but we are both of us vulnerable to its appeal.
I tell him we have nothing in common, but he recognises that for the false postulate it is, and he laughs.
~*~
This story now has a sequel, Improper Fractions.