Disclaimer--None of this is happening. I'm not using any characters who are the property of Paramount. It's all just a dream. Go back to sleep.

Beverly woke up screaming, again.

He held her in his arms, hushed her, soothed her back to sleep, softly stroking her hair, holding her long after her breathing steadied. This was something he hadn't anticipated in his long years of conjuring their lives together; somehow he had never thought she would suffer from nightmares, too. Looking back, it seemed an almost unbelievable oversight--she had been by his side through almost all the events which haunted his own troubled sleep. Why shouldn't the demons plague her, as well?

He tried to recall why he had fallen so far from the mark. Had he thought she was just so much more stable than he? Yes, there was that. He knew much about himself and was quite honest in the dark of the night, knew that her dedication to others was better than his own selfish need to rule. But it was more than that. Had he simply been unwilling to admit any fault in the object of his adoration? No. The one thing she never had been was an object, and he was always willing to admit her flaws--the quick temper, the biting wit which could turn sharp as a lash, the impulsive drives. What then? Why had he thought her impervious?

And he had thought of her as impervious, though he could no longer quite recall why. Her breath stirred the hairs on his chest and a few other sensations as well and he held her closer, feeling her respond to his touch. Yes, that was part of it, too. He had always thought of her as two separate beings, his sharp tempered friend who rushed in where no sane or reasonable person would dare, and the woman he loved, a timid person, a fairy creature who reacted but did not act, responded but did not initiate. Nothing in the years they had lived in such close proximity had made him change his mind; he had watched her get swept away again and again in the times and tides of other men. Even this, this peaceful life in their shared quarters, these nights of sated sleep, were his idea and his pursuit. She followed his lead like a good dancer should, never giving herself away.

Did she follow in his lead about the nightmares, as well? She had never complained about them during any of their early morning meals, as he had, from time to time, torn between his wounded pride and his need for solace only she could give. Perhaps she never had them before sharing his bed, waking him from his dreams, comforting and soothing him and loving him back to sleep. He had often feared he would bring her to harm, and perhaps he had. Could the poison in his soul which let loose the demons of his dreams have infected her as well? When? With the food he gave her to eat? In the air they breathed? When he emptied himself into her, filling her with his life and his essence, did he fill her with the cancer which ate away at his soul?

Or had she always dreamed like this, but kept her own counsel? It would have been like her. After a friendship of almost three decades, a life in common so long, and now this shared life, there was still so much he did not know about her. Sometimes that upset him (if she weren't now nuzzling into him in her sleep, he would have admitted that it angered him), that she demanded absolute truth of him and refused to open the Pandora's chest of herself at all. But maybe that was what attracted him and held him captive for so long, the mystery, the aura, the reflections of himself in her eyes?

Reflection. Reaction. Response. How long had he thought of her as basically passionless? Oh, certainly for immediate ends or professionally she found enough to say and was more vehement than she had a right to be, but as a woman? Of course not. She never needed, barely wanted anyone or anything. Nothing touched her for long. Nothing ever could. At first, when they had first moved into common quarters and she spent night after night responding so passionately to his need for love and reassurance, he thought he had been wrong, perhaps had only been searching for a convenient way to explain, all those years, why she never reciprocated his feelings. But now, after all these months, he knew he had been right. He had even proven it to himself one night, when she had been called to an emergency, leaving her personal logs open. Her crises received more attention in his logs than in hers, and he was barely ever mentioned, for good or for ill. There were long livid outbursts of emotion followed by arid stretches of the barest facts, days after days of commonplace quodotia or meetings with friends not himself. No real mention of how he had pursued her or won her, of their courtship or developing emotions, only dry accounts of surgical procedures and lives she had saved, of drama groups and ethnobotany experiments, of bridge duty and shipboard gossip. None of his concerns were hers, it seemed, and she did not feel as deeply as he did.

She stirred in her sleep and brushed her hips against him. He tightened his arms around her to protect her from the dark dreams and something in anger, too, at the way she could not appreciate his passion. Her eyes opened, deepest blue like the murky bottom of an ocean, swallowing him in their depths as her flesh would later swallow his, squeezing the truth from him, the passion, everything she needed to live, to be whole.

And he gave it, gave it all, gave it gladly, because to make her live was to save himself. Without her, he was incomplete, whether she cared or not. He kissed her and tasted the salt on her cheek, like the aftertaste of his own passions, of the poisons he had shared with her to save himself. His love would doom her, he knew, but he had to save himself, drown himself in her sorrows, float on her buoyant grace.

In loving her he saved himself and he knew that to the both of them that was all that mattered.