Kiss it better (karamel AU)

16

The world is quiet, Mon-El's mind almost blank. Everything is muffled, zoomed out, barely tangible and nearly unable to reach him. All he knows right now is Kara's skin pressed against his. Her fingers playing with the short hair on the back of his neck. Her naked body angled toward him, welcoming in a way that disarms him and leaves him bare far beyond the physical sense.

There's a nagging thought swirling in his head, not loud enough to stir ignored insecurities but still present behind a thin veil, looking for a way to rear its head. This peacefulness, he thinks, must be misplaced. It shouldn't have fit into his life, shouldn't have found adequate space to sit and settle and make him question whether he is worthy of it after all.

It's making him covetous, in all honesty. This; her. He's craving and wanting and demanding. Insatiable in ways unprecedented. Asking. Reaching for it. Taking. Taking and taking and taking. As if he has any right to this happiness. As if he's been honest enough in this love to deserve a piece of it.

Perhaps he should fear it. Good things never last long, do they? Nonetheless, Mon-El cannot find it in himself to pull away. He's riveted in this spot, his heart brittle but obdurate, unswayed by every doubt and vacillation his mind has been digging up. If Kara breaks his heart, he knows he'll accept it without regrets. But if she doesn't, he'll fight with everything that he has to keep her for as long as this fucked up life will allow him.

He has her now. Not a scrap, or a whisper, or a smidgen at best. He's got all of her. And as liberating as it might taste on his tongue, there's also a hint of bitterness. It is not sharp here, now, in her arms, but it will be soon. Which is why he can dismiss it but not escape it.

It's easy to get lost in this moment, however. In the tenderness of Kara's touch and the steadiness of her breaths. A whiff of vanilla distracts him again and he starts nosing along the expanse of her stomach, down the slope of her ribcage where he's recently discovered a ticklish spot. A sudden inhale, a tiny tremble of her chest and here it is — the first giggle. Breathless as she makes him, stifled at first but then as honest and stunning as her feelings for him.

See? This is it. This is why he cannot give her up, why he wants to tell her everything about him and his life and the risk she's taking by being with him. And it's why he chokes on the words whenever he's contemplating on coming clean. Because how can he lose her? How can he find the courage to let go of the only person who's ever made him feel this way: deserving of happiness and bold enough to grasp on it, content and safe and normal? It's never been like this before.

If you ask him, he doesn't even know how it's come to this; so swift it's been, so unceremonious. Before her, he thought falling in love was difficult and rare for him, something that demanded grueling effort and required sacrifices others didn't seem obliged to offer. It had never been as effortless as Winn had said it was, nor as natural as his parents showcased it as. For a few years, back when he was younger and more susceptible to insecurities fabricated by stranger's tongues, he'd thought himself unlovable. He'd blamed his past trauma and the skeletons in his closet, his complicated life, the fault in his genes. Once upon a time, Mon-El had considered himself a doomed being. Even when the self-loathing turned into resentment of his origins and his dead name, he still didn't expect to live a day when he'd be so reticent and avid at the same time.

And then he met Kara. A change, a whole, distinguished paragraph all on her own. The romantic, completely infatuated part of him would like to claim she's his saving grace, the one he's been waiting for all along. But he can't say that — shouldn't even be thinking it. Because he doesn't need saving, if anything, Kara should be saved from him. Had he been a little less selfish, he would have let her go the day Lilian showed up and gave him Rhea's note. Had he been a braver man, he would've stayed inside his lonely, loveless, risk-free bubble and kept anyone who didn't know better away from him, away from the monsters under his bed and the ones he shares blood with.