The cadence of his lungs is wrong. It’s quivering and unsure, the ingrained involuntary memory there long lost and now forced to shake off the rust and shutter back to work. Is it the sudden jolt back to life that has his breath jerking and heaving off rhythm or is it the electric touch of her skin on his own?

When she squeezes his hand, he’s wide-eyed gasping. When she brings it up to the petal-soft of her lips, he all but hyperventilates. The quick and dirty inhales bring her scent in and at first it’s a struggle to decipher her amongst the sickening, sticky sweet of the flower trees. He needs to be closer.

Thankfully, as if privy to his thoughts, she at that moment leaps. For the first time in decades (in lifetimes, in dreams), he’s there to catch her. Lifts her off tiptoe to take their collective weight and crushes her against his body. For all his strength, she clings to him every bit as hard in turn. How is he to know the difference between pain and pressure? It’s all too glorious to matter, too agonizing to bother sorting. All he knows or cares to know, is how the span of his arms is just the right length to incage her against him. How the overwhelming flood of sensation is honed down to something manageable as long as she’s trapped just so.

“I’m...here?” he whispers into the delicate skin of her neck. He can feel it - just there, beyond the tickling of baby hairs, so close beneath his lips. Her pulse! Too quick and too staccato, but strong and vivid and right here.

He nuzzles in, as close to her heartbeat as he can get. He knew she wouldn’t be sugary sweet. No. No delicate, pale and powdering perfume for his Electra. She’s a spice he can’t name, something exotic and without label and potent enough to bring forth flashes of emotion he can’t identify or replicate on his own. It’s all at once his favorite scent in the world and he inhales deeply from her hair, trying to isolate her smell amongst the barrage of other senses so he can file it away in the deep and precious recesses he keeps her in the long years they are apart.

Jack is crying.

At least he thinks he could be, the sensation so long forgotten now he’s not sure he can recognize it. Why else does her outline grow blurry, magnified and duplicated through diamond facets until she’s all but illuminated in an aura of colors too bright to describe?

She’s saying something, but it’s too slurred and muffled against his shirt collar for him to fully make out. He sets her down, granting only a fraction of space back to shake his head down at her. He frames her beloved face in his hands. “What? Oh my darling. My dearest darling, don’t cry,” he laughs, breathless and blinking too fast from his own joy. He wipes the tear tracks away, making circles from the apple of her cheeks to her hairline and back again, just for the need to touch her. She is soft in a way he’d never imagined. Smooth and without perfection, but real. He’s aware, as a learned man, she is perhaps idolized and without flaw in his memory because he loves her so. To find the living, breathing version of Electra is equally without fault is both awesome and humbling. He knows what she has suffered to be so.

She is as art to him. Though he’s only viewed pale black and white replicas in books, the way his soul alights when he looks down into her eyes feels the same.

Jack leans in, peppers gentle, tentative kisses to the places the light hits her face. Her sharp cheekbone, the wing of her brow, her strong chin. Back up to the tip of her nose. He makes a second round, relearning the angles he loves so well with new senses.

It’s more than he’d ever dreamed. And still not enough.

With a furtive glance around, he dips to band both arms around her waist, lifting her slight weight like a second thought. She feels small in his clumsy, unpracticed hands. So incredibly warm. He hoists her high, a golden goddess above him he must tilt back to stare at in adoration. He settles her snug against his front so he can stride them towards the nearest cluster of canopy trees.

Jack doesn’t want an audience. It’s suddenly imperative that the only eyes on her right now are his own. No one else gets to protrude into this moment, no one else gets to bear witness to the wonder that shines from her face. He’s waited too long, shared her with too many others and too much time and too much impossibility.

At the nearest ancient oak, he lets her slide slowly down his length to her own feet. With trembling, cautious grip at her waist, Jack leans in, closes his eyes as his forehead meets hers.

He kisses her.

Timid at first, just the barest chapped touch of his lips to her in front of a shaky inhale. Because the cowardly part of him is still sure she’ll vanish from beneath him, afraid that if he presses for more, she will dissipate and once again leave him to tumble head over toe through the colorless void alone.

When she remains solid and real beneath his hands, Jack moans.

“Electra.”

The second kiss is his control snapping.

He pins her against the tree trunk, following immediately to crush her in a hot blur of hungry hands and lips. He snakes his fingers through her curls, swallowing her gasps with a relentless tongue. When she’s not close enough for his liking, he hikes her thigh up around his waist, collides in to press himself intimately to her warmth. And when that’s still not close enough, he sweeps her up again off her feet, forces her up to rely on the consistent press of his hips and the breadth of his shoulders to avoid toppling.

He curls himself around her, pinning her with the long line of his frame till she’s fully tucked against him. No room for the wishes and regrets and heartache that always clothe them both like impenetrable armor. Just the curves of her body melded so neatly into the negative spaces of his own. Like she’s been hand crafted to be there.

He can’t imagine the first sunrise in existence was ever half so wonderful. Beyond comprehension, beyond description. The touch of her mouth is all the magic he’ll ever need know.

He kisses her until her mouth is red and swollen, his claim visible there and in the flush high on her cheeks. He kisses her until the new cursed need for oxygen has him pulling back gasping, unwilling to give an inch between them though he is a slave to his body’s necessities. But she’s been a necessity longer than air and he dares not tary from her mouth for more than it takes to refill his lungs and dive back in.

He kisses her until she’s whimpering, clinging to him as if she’d like to climb inside and by the gods, he’ll let her in. She’s been there since that day so long ago at the river’s edge, had hollowed a space for herself in the core of him and he’s forgotten how to be complete without her constant presence.

“I told you I would if I could,” he murmurs between kisses. The surprise in her tone doesn’t sit right with him. As if she doubted he’d been turning the Realm of the Dead upside down for a way back to her. As if she doubts his steadfast heart. It tightens, threatening to freeze back to stone at the notion.

“You must know - surely you must know.”

Jack trails biting kisses along her jaw, down to the lifeblood coursing just below her skin. He nips and laves at her collarbone, nudging aside the annoyingly high neck of her gown to reach the velvet expanse beneath. Every touch to her body brings forth a corresponding action and he’s heady with the power to make her shiver and squirm.

He sucks at the tender flesh behind her ear, voice gravel-shod and husky as he whispers, “If it were up to me, I would never leave your side again.”

If such a fantasy were possible, if heated confessions spoken during hasty meetings weren’t all there was for them. If Jack had been a better soldier and survived whatever defeated him and if she was a stronger medium who could summon and command her magic at will. If their entire relationship wasn’t a broken timeline of random, uncontrollable happenstances that brought equal amounts of agony with the joy.

If he actually had a right to pin her against trees without invitation, her silken thighs one fabric layer away from his fingertips and the damp center of her radiating heat against the bulge starting to painfully tent his trousers.

Gods above, if someone were to walk by and see them, he’d be put on trial and hung for violating a noble woman. And she, she had been merely glad to see him.

Jack withdraws with a grunt. Not entirely - he knows he should while he’s still got control of himself, but he can’t. So he hovers, lungs heaving and trembling with self restraint, putting just enough distance between them to lower her to the mossy ground and clench at her shoulders lest his hands drift anywhere else.

“Aura’s Tears, I’m sorry,” he pants, “I should not throw myself so zealously upon you, how brutish.” And here he’d meant to apologize for his callous, primitive behavior at their last meeting. How quickly he’s forgotten his place, all thought of her station and class burnt away by the fire she sparks in his blood. “Forgive me. I just-”

He bunts his forehead against hers again, taking a moment to regain control. He brings a palm up to cup her chin, thumbs the stubble-chaffed swell of her bottom lip longingly.

“Why, you could be a married woman now, for all I know.” His smile is rueful. Pained. So much time lost, so much of her life he has no right to but misses just the same. “How long has it been?”