I Feel Celestial

"Huh."

Was the first thing Gabriel spoke when he woke up. He turned his head to see Max looking at him, chin propped on a hand, dopey smile on his face. It happened so often it couldn't even be considered out of the ordinary.

Of course, upon being caught, the tips of Max's ears reddened in their usual fashion, and Gabriel grinned as he reached out to touch them.

"You're incredibly creepy."

Max swatted at his hand, huffing and grunting and resenting it, but leaning in to kiss his cheek good morning all the same.

"So what if I am."

The remnants of a grin were still present in Gabriel's voice when he asked, "how long have you been awake?"

The kiss was short and quick, and when it ended Max moved away but didn't get up from the bed. It was going to be one of those lazy ones.

"Few... minutes... Like, fifteen..."

"It's been an hour, hasn't it?"

There was a guilty pause, contemplating denial, but succumbing to grumpiness.

"Why're you being so cheery anyway," Max groaned, and in this instance Gabriel could tell that 'cheery' was serving as a placeholder for 'smartass.'

But the question was worth repeating. He tried to remember, back to little more than a minute ago, the moment he saw real sunlight instead of the sunlight in his...

"Dream."

Max looked at him oddly, or he would have, if he hadn't been preoccupied with pressing his lips to Gabriel's shoulder. The kiss was curious, though, in the way only an old lover's kiss could be.

"I had a dream..."

"Was it a nice dream?" Max murmured against him, hand rested comfortably on his stomach.

"It was... strange..."

"Kinky?" Max smirked, emphasizing the word with a graze of his teeth against his collarbone. Gabriel pouted, both at the distraction and the suggestion, elbowing him slightly.

"No, it was just... you were in it..."

"Naturally..."

"And I was, too. But I wasn't me..."

Max stopped his assault of Gabriel’s neck for a second, but only for a second. "How come?"

"I was flying..."

A cross between a snort and a laugh erupted from Max. "What? Like Superman?"

Gabriel shook his head, and the disbelief quickly left Max's features.

"No... I had wings..." he continued, filling with incredulity himself. He half-expected Max to name one of the X-men and was grateful when he refrained.

"Wings, of all things..."

"That's not so hard to imagine..." The smile was palpable in Max's words, soft and sweet on the skin under his ear. "Though it won't really take more than a couple of feathers to make you float away..."

"...and we weren't in the city..." Gabriel had closed his eyes again, piecing bits together. Sunlight, feathers, and water...

"By the sea. Yes." It had been a lovely blue, like the sky with a billion more stars, the way it sparkled and stirred.

The view had been from somewhere high, from someone looking down at things, from something that didn't quite belong.

"You were on the shore, looking at me..." Nothing out of the ordinary, even in a dream. Gabriel pursed his lips, eyebrows knotted like a bow. "You didn't have them..."

"Got no use for them anyway." Max mouthed along his jaw, unbothered. "Give me horns any day."

Gabriel laughed, he couldn't help it. "That's the thing! You looked like you were thinking that too."

He refused to say aloud, though, that as lovely the scene was – sand and surf and celestial leftovers – a certain kind of sticky, inescapable sadness permeated the Max and the Gabriel in that alternate reality.

They had both been smiling, and it had been an extraordinarily beautiful day, and the two of them were so starkly different… but they looked at each other as if they wished – prayed – they could be the same.

It reminded him of Icarus, only he was flying away from the sun, not towards it, and with more love instead of wax.

He didn't even realize how silent they had become until Max began to talk into his hair, his stubble tickling Gabriel's scalp.

"I think it means you want to have sex. In space."

"Why does it have to be in space?"

"Where else?"

"I don't know. The beach?"

"A beach in space?"

Gabriel pondered that, already light years away from that place where everything wasn't the way it was right now.

"They did find some water in Mars... probably more like a river, though."

"Space river sex? We'll take it." Max was on top of him in an inhale, settled between his legs on the exhale.

"We're not in space," Gabriel squealed – there was really no other way to define the sound – in protest, though it made for the least convincing protest of all time. "Or remotely near water!"

"Close enough!" Max laughed, even as he nudged against the entrance, simultaneously busying himself with marking Gabriel’s throat.

"You're lucky it was a nice dream," Gabriel said, petulant without really meaning it, flushing when a premature moan escaped. And if either of them had a fleeting recollection of what it had been like to fly, and to fall, and to feel the majesty and cruelty of eternity all at once, it was forgotten when they started to

"Oh, fuck."