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It happens every so often, late at night, in the dark and quiet of their shared bed in their shared block in their communal home that isn’t quite a hive and isn’t quite a house. Rose wakes her with a sharp sound, a sad sound, still asleep with her eyelids fluttering, limbs twitching in imagined defense – or more likely, offense – against some phantom in her dreams.
The first few times, Kanaya manages to scare the shit out of them both, because her instincts say defend and her body leaps up to do so, groggy and confused and every nerve strung tight and ready to destroy whatever has Rose upset. When they’ve stopped shouting they start laughing, pump biscuits pounding in mutual rhythm as they settle back down and carefully avoid discussing it at all, for a time.
Eventually, Rose tells her about it. Memories, bad memories, bloody memories, and Kanaya perfectly understands. She has more than a few of those, herself. They exchange recurring unpleasant image reels playing for them through the night and find that airing it out helps. It absolutely helps. But there’s no cure except perhaps for time, and while they have plenty of that, there’s no way for either of them to hurry the process along.
So now when it happens, instead of snapping awake and jumping instinctively to violent conclusions, Kanaya makes an effort instead to take a deep breath. To carefully place her arms around her gorgeous, silly, strong and still so beautifully soft human wife. She runs her fingers up her back and makes little shooshing sounds, a situation which makes her blush terribly – there’s nothing pale about her feelings for Rose, but humans make everything so complicated in all the most wonderful ways. Rose’s limbs still, her breathing evens, and the wrinkles on her forehead slowly smooth away.
And Kanaya keeps going, long after she should probably stop, tracing her fingers up over the back of Rose’s neck, into the fine strands of her incredible, impossibly pale head of hair. Her chest rumbles with affection and contentment, and Rose murmurs softly in her sleep, and her long and dignified nose is very sharp in Kanaya’s shoulder, but that’s all right. She traces the places where Rose’s horns would be – she’s imagined them so many times, long and curved and beautiful – and smiles, half asleep and sinking fast.
She doesn’t need them, of course. But it’s fun to think about, in dreams.