Chapter Text
You adored nights like this one, even if they did take place on this planet. This planet, a godforsaken orb of humidity and shifty miners and bounty hunters. What did it say about Ezra that you would follow him to a place like this? And stay long enough to set up something adjacent to a home there with him? What did it say about you?
You supposed Ezra had the ability to bring this out of you-- a kind of recklessness that flies in the face of years’ worth of rationality you had once prided yourself on. One look into his ochre eyes, glinting mischievously with the devils and damsels of his past lives, and you were lost. Sunk deep into the black, endless tarpits that constituted his merciless gaze.
And if you thought his eyes were quick to draw you in, his silver tongue did the rest.
On nights like this, where the evening air cooled the terrain, simultaneously leaving it in a humid dampness, you find yourself in your favorite position: Ezra, reclining on the lumpy monstrosity he has the audacity to call a “couch,” while you curl across his lap, reading aloud to him at the end of a long day.
“The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.
When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;
When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,
Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,
Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter
Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;
“When over the houses, a golden illusion
Brings back an earlier season of quiet
And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness—
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.”
As you finished the poem, you heard Ezra let out a sigh that you could’ve sworn was weary, rather than content. His hand ceased its back-and-forth journey of skimming up and down your arm, a road it has travelled many times before, ultimately coming to rest at your shoulder.
“Ez?” You tilted your face to glance up at him, meeting his hooded, pitch eyes. He quirked an eyebrow at you, looking down his strong, hawkish nose at you, letting out the rest of the breath he was holding.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” you jested, bumping his abdomen lightly with your elbow, “Am I boring you?”
“My venerable treasure, you know full well that you are the furthest thing I associate with tedium. Your voice is the song of the meadowlark, the wind through the trees. The respite at the end of a haul. The--”
“Yes, yes, I know all that,” you swat at his arm playfully. “Why the-- “ you mock his sigh exaggeratedly, “the deflation?”
Ezra huffs again. And you huff back, if for no other reason than to annoy him and point out the sheer ludicrousness of his reaction.
“My darling, my lunar goddess, the very center of my orbit, you have impeccable taste in general, so I would be hesitant to critique that which my own tastes are bereft of understanding, but your chosen stanzas of late--”
“In English, please, Ez.”
“Your poem, my sweet bird. Your poem.. It’s a tad… morose is it not? The sameness in your choice of verse as our days pass--”
“Sameness is tedium, Ez. You just said--”
“I said I do not associate YOU with tedium, my heart. However, if my ears are subject to one more poem stuffed to the seams with religious iconoclasty at the expense of our fair moon… Well, let’s just say I’ve never considered myself a man close to God, as you well know. Despite the three-lettered name you call me in the throes of a dalliance…”
“Ezra!” You smacked his arm in full force, a heated flush working its way up your neck and warming your cheeks. “Fine,” you shuffle back down into his embrace, stretching along his lap. “No more poems about the moon.”
“Oh, do not punish me so. I hold no ill-will toward lunar allure. The poem was just… morose, is all.”
You looked up, meeting his gaze again.
“I just… I can only take prose romanticizing loss and general forlornness so much, you must know,” He muttered.
You sat up again, cupping his cheeks in your palms.
“Ezra, the entire point of my reading to you is to help you relax at the end of the day. If my choice of poem isn’t what you need, well, I’ll just try something different,” you placed a gentle peck on the bridge of his strong nose. “Wallace Stephens is a little old-school anyway,” you hummed, slamming the cover of the journal comprising the collected works you’d pencilled in closed. “Besides, everything we have I’ve written from memory. It’s not my fault I remember the sad ones.”
You stood up, Ezra’s eyes following across the room as you bent in front of your rucksack and swapped one journal out for another. You crossed back over to him, resuming your curled position in his lap.
“I assume you have no objection to love poems?” You quirked an eyebrow at Ezra teasingly.
In turn, Ezra had the decency to look mildly offended, even in jest.
“Is it not true that it is said that poetry is the food of love? Well then, I expect a delectable three-course meal, after which I shall fall madly in love with you all over again. Dictate on, birdie.”
You rest your cheek on his strong thigh, holding the little book out. As you begin to read, Ezra’s hand slips down to the nape of your neck, stroking through the little baby hairs matted there in the humid heat of this hellish planet, his touch a welcome reprieve.
“In the throes of winter,
Beneath soft, streaked moonlight,
Gale force turns to silence, padded and deafening,
The snow swirling like silver,
Flakes catch in the moonlight of your eyes, and I swear you are more precious;
Winter, fearsome goddess that governs these months,
Gentle and harsh,
Ceasing and relentless,
Winter presses the snow,
Creeping into our consciousness;
“I meet you in the field, no longer green, but fair,
Rushed and thrust into the throes of that goddess Winter;
As we meet in the center, your palms press mine,
Snow is liquid silver--
No, it is white gold.
Winter, that goddess, she presses again--
Presses snow into our palms,
Insistently.
In your fiery touch, white gold transforms,
Into liquid gold,
Where our touch meets;
But your touch has always done that,
It transforms.
And in your fiery palms,
I melt, too.”
As you finish the poem, you quietly close the journal and sneak another toward Ezra’s face, noting how his silvery scars catch the low light of your shared space, his shining obsidian eyes an oil-slick pit of incomprehensibility. You have no idea what he’s thinking. And, in rare form, Ezra is silent.
“Ezra?” You call softly. He turns his head to meet your gaze, strong profile causing shifting shadows on the far wall.
“More Stephens?” He asks. It is rare for Ezra, a man who conveys so many ideas in roughly eight times as many words, to create this level of anxiety in you; rare for you to be unable to decipher his meaning. A quiet, cold panic siezes within your gut as you debate whether to tell him…
To hell with it, you think, he’ll get the truth out of me anyway.
“Um, no, that’s not Stepehens. It’s… Well, I wrote it,” You square your shoulders in preparation for Ezra’s eloquent brand of criticism. “Do you hate it?”
“Do I hate it?” He asked, his tone betraying nothing.
You shift, turning your head away from him, tears pricking the corners of your eyes. How could he be so cruel? Before you can completely turn your head, he catches your chin between his thumb and forefinger and brings his obsidian gaze back to meet yours.
“My dearest love, my stardust, how adroit you are, how resplendent… You say I’m the eloquent one and you… your unparalleled mind created that?” He leans forward and captures your lips in a quick but heated kiss. You close your eyes, the tears from the corners slipping silently down your cheeks.
Ezra draws back, wiping your cheek with his warm, calloused thumb.
“I cannot believe for one moment that you would ferret away the beautiful machinations of your mind from me for one second. Why did you not share that sooner?” Ezra presses.
“Well,” you fiddle with the hem of your threadbare tank top, “Let’s be honest, next to you I’m not nearly as articulate. I thought you would think I was trying too hard, or something. Words are your area, Ez, not mine. You know me. Hit first, ask questions later?” You chuckle weakly.
Ezra’s dark, perpetual gaze refuses to break from the contours of your face as he regards you with care, palm still cradling your cheek. He then barks out a sudden laugh, startling you from your seated position.
“Birdie, I certainly do NOT corner the market on loquaciousness. You can share as much, or as little, of yourself as you want. Though I confess myself a selfish man as I express a desire for your to share more, not less. In layman’s words? I loved your poem.” He skims his hand down your cheek, coming to rest at the hollow of your throat.
You look up at him through your lashes, lips parting as you whisper, “That’s good, then, because it’s… well, it’s about you?” You lilt the end of your confession, as though asking Ezra’s permission to wax poetic about the feelings he incites.
“I’ll say again, my lunar goddess, how adroit, how resplendent, how lustrous and magnanimous your mind, your body, your heart…” with each adjective Ezra leans closer until he is whispering his affectations against your lips.
“Ezra?”
“Birdie.”
“Do you think you could tell me how you feel about me in five syllables or less?”
Ezra chuckles again, softly this time. “Moonshine, I don’t think I could do so adequately in 500 syllables. 5,000. I would need every syllable I am capable of.”
With that, he kisses you again, deeply, your hands sliding up his chest and back to the base of his neck, tangling your fingers into the grown-out curls that rest there. As Ezra slides his tongue against yours, his hand skims down your body and under your thin shirt, coming to rest on your waist.
You break from his kiss, panting slightly, as Ezra regards the state he’s left you in.
“Which is saying something, bird, because, as you know, I am capable of many, many syllables.”