It was need. Neither exactly realized when or how it happened. Words were exchanged, emotions hinted at, but nothing was ever done. Nothing ever could be done. There simply wasn't time or the willingness to make it what it could be. There was only fear. Fear that evolved to a tentative trust. A partnership of sorts. Banter and scorn, rise and fall, lives on the line. Lives never on the line, even when they were, because they weren't lives. They were shadows of lives. Until the day the tentative trust changed to a bond. Something that pulled them closer no matter how they strove to be apart. Something that made them inescapable to each other. Something that drove them, urged them to need. To rely. To want. To...care in a way neither of them would give voice to. Neither could give voice to.

She was too young to know the word; he was old enough to have forgotten it. But it didn't matter. It was there. It echoed in their voices, their glances. The way they walked, the comfort they had with each other's movements. It was there in the need that had borne it. The need that carried them through the worst and the best. The need that wouldn't let them leave each other even when they couldn't stand it, hated it, didn't want it anymore.

It was there and it was unbearable and it was great...and then one day it wasn't. It was gone. It wasn't need anymore. It was love. And they didn't know when it changed to become love in their minds and how they'd acknowledged it, but it was there.

And yet...it was still need. And it always would be.