He's Long Given Up Thoughts

by Paian

Summary:

Mitchell's dying on a crippled spacecraft.

Mitchell/Carter or Mitchell/Vala or Mitchell/reader's choice, pairing or UST or friendship.

Notes:

First paragraph by Thassalia, offered up in a first-lines/last-lines meme.

He's long given up thoughts of meltingly hot days, sunscreen strained and thin and coconuty spread on long limbs, giving them a sheen that says summer and languid hours; that says cold drinks sweaty with condensation, drops of water rolling down sweet skin, slipping into half covered cleavage.

He's long given up fantasies of campfires in sheltering woodlands, warm hearths in comfortable old houses, feather beds mounded in goose-down comforters and afghans someone's great-grandmother knitted, the homey scent of steam and the clanking of old radiators. He's long given up imagining that the engine vibration he can feel through the deck is the rumble of the 'Stang's new V-8, that the chill air passing across the exposed skin of the backs of his hands like the caress of death's fingertips isn't the cabin's atmosphere rushing past him toward the hull breach but just the cold air the blower spits out before it starts pulling heat off the engine, that in another minute the relief of warmth will creep up his legs and wash over his face, that he'll die the easy, sleepy carbon-monoxide death instead of the grisly death of vacuum exposure. He's long given up trying to remember whether suffocation or freezing or decompression gets you first, and which one hurts the most.

But he hasn't given up on rescue, and he hasn't given up on her, and he knows she hasn't given up on him; and after the tingly chill of beaming transport seeps through his body like the blessed warmth of a car heater, a mounded bed, a blazing fireplace, a crackling campfire, a summer's day, when she turns from the control panel to make sure she's got him, there's a sheen of perspiration on her neck and face and down her arms, a cleavage-bound droplet sliding between the knobs of her collarbone, a smile of profound relief melting the grim tension from her face, and he doesn't need his imagination to warm him anymore.