The following fic was in part inspired by Magik's 'Never the Way I Intended', and to a lesser degree by Indigo's 'Now or Forever'. Please excuse any less than magnificent characterization :)

As usual, it's _very_ short.

Disclaimer: Marvel.

Freedom on a Night Breeze

by Northlight

He awoke in an empty bed, the sheets twisted around his bare legs in a grip his sleeping self had been unable to break free of. The full moon shone down on his body from behind partially closed blinds, and he knew that she'd felt its call even from her place nestled in his arms.

Brian reached down, tugging the sheets back up to his chin as he rolled over on his side. One large hand reached out to rest against Meggan's pillow. It still bore the slight indent of where her head had rested, but it no longer held any of her warmth.

She'd been gone for a long time already. Strange that he'd only just now realized that.

He didn't know how long she'd been slipping out of the bed they shared. Had this urge been inside her, just waiting for a chance to blossom into a nightly routine? Or had she slipped away from his side long before this while he'd remained blissfully unaware of her departure?

His eyes moved towards the luminous moon... the same silent observer that even now Meggan danced beneath, her every indecision and clingy inclination stripped away in the siren call of nature that thrummed in her very blood.

Once, he'd risen from their bed, moving towards the beckoning window in order to see what the night offered her that his presence did not. And he had stood there, silently, in awe as she had shed the form that constrained her and gloried in the air against her upturned face.

He hadn't ventured near the window since.

His Meggan was beautiful. Her face was flawless. Her eyes were wide, innocent, adoring. Golden hair flowed and swirled around a body that came from Brian's most insistent fantasies.

The Meggan that danced beneath the distant stars and silent moon... she was beyond beautiful. She was a creature that surpassed the limits of human boundaries.

And when she let nature's call into her being she was beyond his grasp. Her adoring, loving eyes were for the sky. The earth. The water. Not for him.

He hadn't watched her as she crept from his arms since that night. He did not need to. The sight of her glowing face bathed by moonlight burned so brightly in his mind that he need not.

And so he lay alone in their bed, his eyes closed against the cool glow of the moon that crept into the room they shared. He lay still and silent, waiting as he did every night for her to come back to him.

And dreading the night where the moon was brighter, the earth more welcoming, the water more tempting... and the part of her that needed him willingly drowned in nature's beckoning call.

~End~