saki101

A continuation. Slash. R-ish.

The first six parts of Vortices may be found as follows:

Part VI
Part V
Part IV,
Part III,
Part II and
Part I.
Disclaimer: Don't own any of the characters or their universes and no money is being made!

Also posted on mfu_yumdaily.

Excerpt:

The clouds hadn't rolled in yet when I awoke. The window framed a pale blue sky, the silhouette of the mountain peaks. Time appeared to have moved towards morning in a perfectly ordinary manner.

Vortices

The clouds hadn't rolled in yet when I awoke. The window framed a pale blue sky, the silhouette of the mountain peaks. Time appeared to have moved towards morning in a perfectly ordinary manner.

The air blazed white between the crags. The light poured over Tone's sleeping form. I propped my head on my hand and watched the breeze from the open window lift gleaming strands of his hair. He hadn't cut it since I'd left; it covered the back of his neck, the tops of his ears, soft and thick and pale.

I smoothed the wayward hair, slid my hand over his back to his arm. His skin was cool. Last night it had not been cool. Not at all. My eyes closed as my fingers wandered across the smooth, cool skin. Tone's edges were less sharp now, a little flesh softening the feel of his bones. The thought that it might be more than just the university orchards and dairies nourishing him tightened my fingers around his arm; he murmured in his sleep.

In the dark he had leaned over me speaking my name, calling me back from dreams of him lying on a moonlit bed, the long hair of the woman over him hiding his face from me. His hand had been bright against her dark curls as he pulled her down towards him.

At the sound of his voice, I'd reached up and seized him, dragged him down as I'd just dreamt he had done with another. I rolled us over, pinned him under me. He'd started to say my name once more before I'd covered his mouth. I'd hoped the hours of indulgence with the time camera before my trip would blunt the intensity of my response, but they hadn't. They seemed to have whetted it. I could feel the buttons of his shirt pressing into my chest, the silk of his cummerbund soft at my waist. As I bore down he was as hard against me as I was against him.

Leaves rustled outside the window, a bird twittered; from farther away, another answered. I opened my eyes again. Tone's dress shirt was a crumpled ball near the foot of the bed. I couldn't see where the rest of his clothes were. Didn't exactly recall how I had extracted him from them. I had wanted my head to prevail, to ask why he had come to find me, whether he had been beckoning or waving farewell, but my body had not responded to my brain. It had responded to him.

As it did now. A drowsy sound issued from the pillows. My hand skimmed along Tone's hip. I bent to kiss his sunlit skin. Its fragrance pulled me lower. Tone raised his knee and mumbled something more into his pillow. It may as well have been a command. In another moment, he was trapped beneath me.

********************

I was sprawled against a heap of pillows, sated and sleepy, watching Tone walk across the room. The sun was still out and its beams seemed to be following him to the bookcase on the far wall. Tone was smiling as he sauntered back with a bowl of fruit in his hands. He sat cross-legged on the rumpled bed and offered me a cherry, his look sweetly wicked. I accepted the fruit and pushed aside the idea that he had been refining his wiles since I'd left him. I turned away, glancing out the window as I bit into the fruit. The blossoms of the old cherry tree were just beginning to litter the grass. The taste of the cherry burst across my tongue, the flavour of perfect ripeness. Tone asked if I'd like another. I was rolling the pit around in my mouth as I looked back at him and took what he was offering me.

"How?" I began to ask, holding the cherry up to the light. Its dark skin shone.

"You mentioned you climbed the wall to pick them as a student, so I gathered some yesterday morning," he replied and plucked one off its stem.

"You knew I'd come soon?" I asked and spit the stone into my palm. I didn't know how much time travelling Tone had been doing, although I hadn't sensed him watching. Wasn't sure I would have felt the added presence, considering how occupied my senses had been. I studied the relaxed lines of his shoulders, the tilt of his head as he opened his mouth to answer me.

"You said you would," he replied, smiling around the fruit. "So I prepared something with which to welcome you."

It was hard not to stare at his lips as he spoke. My hand was still over my mouth and I was attempting to school the expression of lust which I could feel spreading across my face. I must have succeeded because Tone looked down at the bowl of apples and cherries in his lap, his brow furrowed. Why should he be other than confident? My body had shown him how desired he was. I reached out for his knee. I didn't want to take that confidence away just so I could pretend he had less power over me than he clearly had. Not even to warn him that I'm a man who doesn't stay in one place? He glanced at my hand. I lifted the bowl out of the way, ran my hand up his thigh and ducked my head until I caught his eye. His brow smoothed. No, not even to warn him of that.

**************

The light had grown pearly, the cloud cover nearly complete.

"How did you calculate which would be the right day to harvest?" I asked, pulling a cherry out from between two pillows. Tone snatched it away from me and popped it into his mouth. He smiled as he separated the pulp from the stone. "You didn't calculate the date," I murmured. "You kept going back until they were ripe." His smile grew wider.

Tone rolled onto his stomach, grabbed one of the light green apples which had managed to stay in the bowl and held it out to me.

"How long did it take you to reconstruct your time-tilter?" I asked before biting noisily into the fruit.

"Less than a week," he said, shifting onto his side and resting his head on his hand to look at me. I raised an eyebrow and continued munching. "The students in my Applied Temporal Mechanics class helped me." He sat up. "I was drawing diagrams and explaining to them how the tilter worked. I began to see how much was extraneous in my design." There was a flush creeping up his cheeks. "Then they asked questions, and the more they asked, the more I saw how much I didn't need to make it work." He smiled. "I reconstructed a trimmed-down model and, of course, I had to test it."

I imagined him disappearing into the vortices forever. I must have paled. He patted the side of my foot. "I was sure it would work," he said.

"Where'd you go?" I asked. Brave and foolhardy describes a lot of the people I know, so I succeeded in asking nonchalantly.

"Home, to collect my clothes and books and whatnot," he said, matter-of-factly and I laughed with relief at his apparent success at avoiding his earlier self.

"When?" I asked as my mirth died away.

"A few hours after I'd left," Tone replied.

Left, I thought to myself. That's a word for it. "You were able to time it so precisely?" I asked. Tone nodded and ate another cherry. "Have you been back since?"

"No, I took care of everything then, although it required a few trips to and fro that evening."

"You used your original machine to return?" I enquired.

"I set the new tilter on an automatic timer to pull me back, although I figured I could use the old one if the timer failed," he answered blithely.

I wondered whether I could have found him if neither had worked. "Time travel outside the university can have dangerous repercussions," I recited and noticed the faint waver in my voice.

He hung his head and looked so like a chastised schoolboy that I almost laughed again. "Dean Lloyd told me," Tone said. "I was so proud my new model worked and that I'd been able to bring all my things with me."

"You hadn't told anyone else?" I asked.

Tone shook his head. "The dean happened to be the first person I saw the next morning, on my way to the dining hall," Tone said.

I doubted that was happenstance.

"He told me not to tell anyone else unless he authorised it," Tone finished. "I had been planning to tell my students."

"You're telling me now," I pointed out.

Tone looked up. "I'm certain 'anyone' didn't include you," he replied. "And the dean did commend me when I explained that I'd dismantled my old time-tilter on my last trip."

"But you visited me," I observed softly.

"No," Tone said, his eyes dropping to the wooden bowl. "Just the time camera went," he added as his hand closed around the last apple in the bowl.

I wanted to know why, but instead I asked, "How did you know where to send it?"

He looked up at me from beneath his brows. "I walked out to the plateau and set it adrift on your most recent current," he replied, setting the apple on the duvet and pushing it in my direction to demonstrate.

"Is your new time-tilter small enough to bring all the way out there?" I probed.

His hair fell down into his eyes when he shook his head. "I don't need it," he whispered.

It was as I had suspected and I think he knew from his weeks at the university that that wasn't something anyone else could do. Oddly, I suppose, my next question wasn't about that remarkable fact and I didn't doubt for a moment that it was a fact. "Didn't you want those hours anymore?" I enquired, staring at the hair falling over his eyes. The tone of my voice revealed rather more about my state of mind than I would have wished.

His head snapped up. "I thought you might like a memento," he replied.

The room seemed to grow darker. I couldn't bring myself to ask whether he had intended it to be a parting gift, but I kept looking at him.

"I built a new model of it, too, and duplicated the contents," Tone continued, looking straight back at me. "Since you needed to be away for so long."

"Far too long," I agreed and reached out for him.

******************