Where The Sky Is The Limit
She doesn't think of what they do together as "fucking." It is a hard word, full of sharp edges, and Alex has known enough of violence without inviting it into her bed. They don't "make love," either. It would be a silly and overly-sentimental term, even if she did love Quinn.
They are together because the world didn't end. They are together because making do has become a way of life. She's seen what's left of the world, and Alex has no illusions as to true love and happily ever after.
This is the best this life has to offer her. This is the only life she has to live: planting seeds in patches of earth not scorched beyond use; tending to scrapes and bruises, and watching after Quinn when the children wake screaming in the night; and sharing bed and body and companionship with him.
And always, always, now and forever, keeping one eye to the sky.
It is a good life. A better life than she had dreamed of, even a year ago.
They do not love each other, she and Quinn. They are comfortable together, and being with him is as close to peace as she will ever know. They work well together, and that is a matter of survival, even now, three months since they have last seen a dragon. She might grow old with this man (old--older--a relative term: maybe she'll die at fifty, when hardly anyone else reaches forty-five, thirty-five).
They hardly know each other, she and Quinn.
She has not told Quinn that her father died of cancer, two months before the world learned of real dragons. She has not told Quinn of her mother, tired, so tired, and far from fast enough. These stories are still deep, painful, nothing special at all.
She does not speak of home--an ocean away, a lifetime away, and she'll never know what happened to the people she left behind. She doesn't tell him about the house that she still remembers from before, about her goldfish, about the teddy bear she had cried over for days, even though she had believed herself long past childish things. There is no need to speak of the shelters she'd spent the great majority of her life in--like this, almost exactly like this, for all that Van Zan had dismissed this place and these people with casual arrogance.
She does not tell Quinn that, as a little girl, she had read books about telepathic dragons and soul-bonds. She doesn't tell him of the poster that hung above her bed, or the cheap statuette on her night-table. She used to dream about riding dragons, and thinks that might make Quinn laugh.
Quinn knows that she can fly, that she can handle a gun, that she won't flinch when caring for burned skin. He knows that she is a survivor, and that that is what their world will be built upon.
If they are lucky, there may come a day when that isn't the only thing that matters.