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If Klaus closes his eyes and doesn’t think too hard about it, he can almost pretend the pillow under his head is Ben’s chest. That the heartbeat he hears isn’t his own, hammering as it always does after the years of stress he’s put it through.
Ben’s voice is quiet but clear as he reads aloud from his book. It’s the usual boring Russian shit he likes to read, but Klaus likes listening to it anyway, even if he can’t follow the story most of the time.
He listens to Ben’s voice and shuffles closer to his noncorporeal body on the bed beside him, wishing he could put an arm around Ben while letting the soft changes in his tone lull him halfway to sleep.
Ben stops reading in the middle of a sentence. “Klaus,” he says. Klaus opens an eye. “You have to turn the page.”
Klaus does, and Ben goes on reading until Klaus can’t fight the comedown from the cocktail of drugs he’d taken any longer and succumbs to the sleep that hasn’t come in days.
Ben lowers himself to lie beside Klaus, watching his long eyelashes twitch while he dreams, the book still open between them.