Ya'aburnee
[Arabic] "You bury me." It's a declaration of one's hope that they'll die before another person,
because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

They sat cross-legged on the mattress, facing each other, elbows propped up on their knees and pinky fingers locked together in a promise.

"You and me," James said, and his honey eyes were pooling into molten gold, "just like this, all the time."

"Bones connected, lips locked," Lily agreed, and her eyes were dizzying discs of neon light that popped and sizzled right into his skin to tinge his soul, and it was stitched into his body and he felt safe again.

"Tongues tied," he added, and winked when she laughed at him. He tucked the echo of that laugh away for when he'd need it next. "I love you, by the way."

She blew him a kiss with her free hand.

And he caught it on his lips.

They untwined their I-swear little fingers and crawled over the blankets, landing on the white linen pillows in sheets of red and a mop of black, peach-and-ivory skin flushed with unhandled love and cross-hearted promises.

Crossed and hoped to die, one after the other, the way romance was – literarily – supposed to be.

Lily glanced at him and he glanced back. Their eyes locked like they used to but the heaviness in the air had dissipated, and the only thing that lingered was that relieving sense of finally because in the end, they'd made it, and everything was all right.

James flipped his hand palm-up and his thumb grazed her thigh, skin-on-skin, and it sparked and sizzled and even when it was an accident, she loved the way he touched her.

"Hold my hand," he said quietly. He already missed the way the atoms of her skin and bones matched so perfectly with his. That was love, that was meant-to-be, when your skin knew it before you did.

She slipped her hand into his, and their fingers locked of their own accord.

There was a beat of silence. He turned on his side to whisper in her ear.

"I want you forever," he confided, like they were children sharing secrets in the treehouse, late afternoon at some adult's house they didn't know while their parents drank tea and the children scraped their knees.

The secret passed from his lips to her ear, and it skipped across the astral planes and hid itself away for safekeeping.

"And maybe for another forever after that," Lily said, just as quietly, and that secret followed the other's path, down the yellow-brick road to another Neverland, just in case they needed it anytime soon.

His fingers twisted through her hair, red twining around peach, and he watched it shimmer in the last vestiges of the candle they'd kept burning while the moon rose outside their window.

"Every last infinity."

"And a half," Lily offered him a wry smile that he returned, bursting at the seams with halves of infinities that pieced together to be their whole forever. "Just in case."

His fingers tightened between hers and hers squeezed back, and she leaned in and he met her halfway, murmuring just before two lips became one kiss:

"Just in case."

A/N: Well, put a cap on this, because that's this project done. Five interwoven drabbles in one day – not bad, not bad at all.