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Four thousand eight hundred and seven...
Four thousand eight hundred and eight...
Four thousand eight hundred and nine...
Four thousand eight hundred and ten...
Four thousand eight hundred and eleven...
The gentle echoes of rain patter across the windowsill, forming a soothing ambiance for most. Nero is not most. Most would not be awake at this ungodly hour, their aching pupils forming flashes and swirls across the plastered surface. His body begged to rest, his muscles staying perfectly still. He tried to relax himself as hard as he could by counting, but his mind would not budge, not allowing him to go gently into the night. He’d forgotten when he started; he hadn’t checked if he’d skipped or repeated numbers; he just counted in his head until he figured his brain would reach some sort of integer limit and finally crash.
Since that fateful day when the city went cold, the two guards had barely slept. Fellow administration members had reported stories and rumors amongst each other of Nero wandering the darkened halls of the lab with a staggered, zombie-like gait. His listless hands would shuffle through the archives, brushing over the covers of books. Whether it was a book of history, science, or mere fiction that he pried his fatigued eyes to, it didn’t matter. He needed something—anything—to do to stave off the unbearable ennui. Rarely would he remember what his cloudy eyes had discerned the next morning.
Despite his shuddering, pained eyes, Nero stood firmly at the edge of the resting and waking world, counting numbers to try and push back the pain of thinking about else besides.
Four thousand eight hundred and fifty-two...
Four thousand eight hundred and fifty-three...
Four thousand eight —
Nero is thrust away from the cliff of rest with a sudden shove, a yelp of despair resounding beside him. A face emerged from her bed beside his, stirring and shuffling beneath the covers as she started to awaken. Rossa, his dear partner, was covered in sweat as she writhed in bed, whimpering and crying. This had happened as always for weeks now, when she sunk into the deeper bowels of rest and her neurons started to wander through her memories only to arrive at the memory of their great failure. She was the more ardent and rash of the duo, and her terrors manifested in this manner as well. She lifts upright, panting and stifling her uncontrollable wails of panic.
Nero hated this stimulus, one of the few things he could attribute such strong emotional diction to. Rossa just had that effect on him. He hated her wails and thrashes of terror, how it always made sleep that much more unreachable, and he despised hearing her undergo such distress. This wretched alliance of insomnia and night terrors had started to erode their sanities, depriving their bodies of the peace at night that they so craved and required.
Nero lifted himself from his jumbled sheets, limping across to Rossa’s bed. His eyes were dark and drowsy, his long hair tousled and messy (which would surely cause him frustration once it was time to rise), flowing behind his back to the foot of her bed.
“Rossa. I’m here with you in this,” he whispered gently to try and soothe her, speaking just above Rossa’s trembling breaths and leaning over her bedside.
“Deep breaths… just—” Before he could get out another word, Rossa’s shrill voice cut through the silence.
“Thank God, Nero, please don’t leave. I thought I had lost you. I saw… I-I saw…” Rossa whimpered, tripping over her words as Nero’s expression tightened in dejection. His hand slowly reached over, comfortably tracing the edge of her lithe forearm, damp with sweat.
“I saw you buried under the rubble, I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t move, this just keeps happening. I-I… Please don’t…” Rossa pleaded and blathered, her shaky brown pupils seeming just as dark as his under the dim lighting. Nero knew she was just as affected by the incident as he was, perhaps more.
Since the day they flew too close to their sun with their experiments on creating a tuner of their own, in a naive hope for its assistance against Al Niente, Instead, they were met with a surge of power, a burst of unstoppable noise, and energy radiating out of it in a blink of an eye. Every single device or mechanism powered by Notalium was overloaded for miles. Then they ruptured, and then they were silenced. The bustling city was transmuted into the epicenter of disaster by their own hands. The two never learned how many lost their lives from the city-wide deluge. Whatever number it was, Nero would never count at night again in distress of reaching it.
“Here, if you ever get worried that I’m gone, just turn, and I’ll be there,” he muttered, climbing closer onto her mattress and leading her down onto the pillows with him by her side. Nero shuddered at his own words, breaking past the shared flashbacks. Would his meager presence even be enough to calm the pleas and fears of his partner? Rossa’s heavy breath hitched, and her hands still clawed against the bed.
“Get back to sleep, Rossa. It’s alright,” he spoke in what he saw as a pathetic excuse for comfort, too far leaned into ordering her around. But to his surprise, her eyes started to sink, her breathing steadily calming down as she collapsed back into the bed. Rossa rolled to her side, slowly but surely slipping into rest as his body spooned and brushed against her back. The sheer difference in their size made it so Nero nearly encompassed Rossa, his chin resting against her locks of scarlet hair. His counting was disrupted, but this act felt much more pleasant than the dull and hopeless repetitions of numerals.
A small whine emerged from Rossa’s form after some time, stirring against the sheets once more. Nero’s slender arms instinctively wrapped around her chest, tightening in a quick squeeze. The terrors that began to surface—the fear of losing her assistant, whom she valued so much—had quickly been suppressed under that little pressure of a hold. Nero said nothing; he barely thought much at the moment. All that felt right was to quietly cling to Rossa’s back, reposing over her unconscious form.
Time passes quietly, and Nero finds the soft fabric of her dress shirt to be enough to distract him from the mindless addition. Nero stared at her slim form and listened to her soft and adorable breaths while she slept, warming his heart and his face. Her tender, sensitive face, the long braids of her tied red hair flowing and splattering against the cushions, they all caught his attention. She was sweet, and just her very appearance made him want to protect her. Of course, at their standing height, when her head wasn’t even eye-level with his neck, it was hard not to feel such adoration. It felt honoring, Nero thought, that Rossa would choose him. Since their first few experiments together, their bond has tightened from mere affiliates and fellow wardens to inseparable partners. Of what manner their partnership exactly was—that was still unknown.
He would do anything to protect her. To keep that smile on her face, to stifle out those cries and whimpers of panic that tormented her away from the depths of rest. He didn’t want to see her hurting. He’d even take the pain himself if it were to bring that smile back. But his insomnia was painful, and it had done nothing to restore her grin. Ever since that day, she has rarely smiled as much as she did prior. Rossa had become cold, irritable, and rash. Her amiability had started to fade into a bitter murmur around other coworkers, even Nero himself at times. Prone to outbursts of stress and irritation, panic attacks, and bouts of aversion, it was clear she wasn’t the same. To Rossa, Nero seemed nearly unchanged. She admired, perhaps envied, his immutability. Blind to his suffering in silence.
Nero would take on projects, responsibilities, and pressures all to himself like a hoarder of blame. Rossa was innocent, Nero was guilty, and he had to prove himself to be more than a burden to the administration. What vile excuse for a lab partner—no, even just a friend —would he be if he were to attribute half those deaths to her? He was the one who misaligned the tuner’s components and who hadn’t had the talent Ritmo and Fisica had. Rossa’s mistakes were just common errors. She was only human. Of course, Rossa was not the only blind one. Nero, in his guilt, could not apply these truths about the natural mistakes of humanity to his being. But that didn’t matter at this moment.
He gripped tighter as he mused, clinging onto her form in pleasant silence, far from the silence that haunted him while he tried to fall asleep earlier or the silence that echoed through the infected fields of monochrome that had come from Al Niente’s devastation. Even if he had not found a permanent solution to his worries and self-blame, he had found consultation with this simple touch. How they cuddled in the depths of the night was perhaps not befitting of mere lab partners or friends, but that didn’t matter. These nice, comforting feelings of rest had been just the catalysts their bodies so desperately needed. Whatever Rossa was to him, he’d be there for her, and she for him, a fact independent of any label. And with that simple stimulant of tranquility, Nero slips into rest.
…
Their eyes slowly opened to the dawn seeping through the window once they were awake, lying beside each other. The patter of the rain has dried up, replaced by the soft chirping of birds in the morning as the sunrise peeks through the clouds. Rossa woke to the feel of Nero’s weight cuddling up to her back, his hands clinging around her shoulders, and his lips resting on her soft nape. Nero awoke to the gentle shuffling in surprise, followed by a stiffness that overcame her body as she slowly leaned back into him. For the first time in weeks, a sense of rejuvenation flowed gently through their veins.
For the first time, silence was not something to be guarded against, but something to be cherished.
