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Waking up in the night was no longer unexpected. I knew it would happen before I even lay my head down to fall asleep, before the nightmares even started.
It would be but another dull facet of routine if it had the grace to simply grow old, and yet every time, every fucking time, I woke in terror.
It didn’t matter how fucking stupid or ridiculous the dream was; I could dream of being slowly dragged across a long beach by an army of crabs and somehow I’d still wake up sweat soaked and shaking. I missed when sleep was as dark and empty as being ‘switched off’ as a construct. All the extra electricity in my body didn’t know where it was meant to go anymore.
It’s not that I preferred being dead. It’s not that there wasn’t anything good about you putting my heart back in my chest and sealing it there with a kiss. But after a certain number of nights waking up halfway to screaming, it kind of felt like I could have gotten a better deal.
You didn’t wake up every time that I did. You may not have slept a lot (against my best wishes), but when you did, you were out. Gasping and thrashing in my sheets wasn’t enough to rouse you, so most nights I could simply lay down facing away from where your bed was and try to calm my heartbeat down until morning. Falling back to sleep was a luxury, but I still got a few hours to compose myself before we got to our days.
You woke up on your own, some nights. I didn’t sleep deeply enough to ignore your nightmares, so I was always right there. Sometimes you were quiet, but even then I felt your warm little hands slipping under the blanket as you snuck into my bed and curled up at my side. Falling back to sleep was a luxury on those nights, as well. I was too busy trying to capture every second, memorise the feeling of you against me, and most of all, avoid the possibility of freaking out in my sleep and catapulting you onto the floor. Even if you weren’t a tiny sad sack of fragile bird bones, I kind of liked your scrawny ass. I was gentle with you these days.
So yeah, the point being, our nights were not great. Even if our days were actually kind of nice now, with me learning how to cook and you exploring the garden and the fact that we kissed a little bit, sometimes. At least that gave me something to think about when I was calming myself down from some ridiculous spectacle of being set on fire and somehow incapable of breaching the surface of the water that could save me.
It was another one of these stupid dreams that ended up doing me in. I couldn’t even remember most of the details, humiliatingly, but I was running through this fog that seemed to go on forever, with all these disembodied voices yelling things from somewhere I was never able to reach. Running was like trying to take a step through treacle, and I couldn’t understand why my body was failing me, why I was failing. I don’t remember everything I heard. I know my dad’s voice was there, and I know right at the end, I could hear you screaming. I didn’t know if you were hurt. It sounded more like you were mad at me.
When I woke up, right on schedule and well on my way to losing it, that was all I could remember. I knew the other details, but they just… weren’t there anymore. Trying to remember the rest of it felt as hopeless as running had in the dream. My mind failed me just as surely as everything else had.
I was tense and tight under the covers, unmoving aside from the heaving of my far-too-rapid breathing. Somehow, it felt like making any movement at all would ruin everything, though I had no idea how. Somehow the tension turned to shaking, and my chest was gripped with a panic that I honestly had no idea how to deal with.
It wasn’t like I’d never felt panic like this before. We were pretty well acquainted by now. The problem was, in other panicky situations, there was something to panic about. Something to focus on. Something like a massive, hulking bone construct spider with a million legs flinging around like spears at my friends, or a very beautiful eldritch being snatching up my most precious person in her arms and whisking you off with her. What the fuck was this about now? Some projection of my subconscious where I was physically unable to run? Lying alone in the dark, in the exact same place at the exact same time as I did so every fucking night?
The hyperventilating and the shaking were getting really hard to contain. I was probably making them both worse by how upset I was about them in the first place, but acknowledging that didn’t help me any. Shockingly (not), it only continued to make both of them worse as I fought to make them stop. My laboured breaths were starting to sound like they were bordering on sobs, and if I started crying, I’d wake you up. I didn’t want to disrupt your sleep, not when you woke up so often already. Two or three times a week, you found your way into my bed. You always managed to fall back to sleep in my arms, but it still meant missing sleep for the hour or so you were up in between, rocking yourself and breathing hard into my shirt. I didn’t want you to do that more than you had to.
But I didn’t know what the fuck to do. Where was I supposed to get panic advice from? My shitty old magazines? The time I spent with my fucking dad, when I was too numb to feel emotions like panic most of the time anyway?
You probably weren’t a great source of advice on that either, being completely honest. But I didn’t care about that. I felt like I was shattering into thousands of pieces and I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t think of a single thing that would help me more than you could.
Maybe it was weak. Certainly it was selfish. But it gave me enough control over the miserable shaking to peel the covers off from me and stagger across the space between our beds, getting all the way to the floor at your bedside before collapsing to my knees and rethinking everything.
My knees hitting the floor must have alerted you, or maybe the heavy breathing that I still couldn’t get a handle on, because you shifted slightly under the covers. The guilt was immediate, and a horrible sobbing sound cracked out of me.
You moved more quickly after that, the blankets rustling as you turned over, half sitting to fumble for me in the dark.
“Griddle?” you rasped, clearly still reaching wakefulness. Your hand found my cheek, finding me shaking and tear-stained, and that seemed to bring you the rest of the way there. “Gideon!”
I tried to say something, tell you that I was fine, really, just a little overdramatic, but all that came out was a tearful whimper between heaving gasps for air. It was miserable. I didn’t want you to worry about me, but I couldn’t even find the words to reassure you.
You sat up fully then, swinging your legs over the side of the bed and guiding me into your lap. Distantly, I heard your voice again, soft and slow, and your fingers weaved through my hair as you pulled me closer. My head rested against the softness that was beginning to appear at your hip bone, and you called me “beloved” and then I really started to cry.
It was fucking embarrassing, Harrow, if that helps at all with the fact that I woke you up just to immediately smear snot all over your nightgown. Sobs wracked my body so hard I thought I would break into pieces, each breath hard won and fleeting. I felt suddenly and entirely out of control with my body, which was a pretty big statement given the kind of control my body had been under the last year. I literally couldn’t do anything. I tried to make some kind of pathetic explanation in between sobbing, but my ability to form words was pretty much shot and you only shushed me, continuing to gently stroke my hair. You let me cry, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening.
I couldn’t believe you were ever so composed after your nightmares. I mean, sure, you cried while I held you sometimes, but you never seemed to be this terribly out of control. I hadn’t seen you properly lose it since Canaan House, most of which I couldn’t entirely see anyways - and maybe sort of back on the Mithraeum, before we did away with John, though that was obviously kind of a different situation. No matter how much I tried to convince myself it was okay to need you the way you needed me, it felt like I was tipping the scales. I was taking too much from you.
I hadn’t even stopped crying, but once I quieted just a fraction, convulsions slowing to trembling, you guided me upwards, still with that gentleness in your hands. I went where you led me, back to my feet and then into bed beside you. You felt my hesitation and murmured softly at my ear, drawing me closer to you, placing my head on your chest and stroking through my hair as I lay myself down.
“I don’t want to crush you,” I managed to choke out, trying not to let my weight touch the fragile outline of your body.
“You won’t,” you assured me, but guided me to one side so that I was half at your side and half against your chest. You stroked my cheek, tender, soft, and let me sniffle through the last round of my tears. After that, we lay in silence for a comfortable amount of time, my heartbeat slowly returning to normal as it knocked against yours. Your arms stayed around me, unwavering, your hands making soft patterns against my scalp, my shoulder blade.
Eventually, I felt your head shift, and you whispered, “Do you need a tissue?”
A very polite way to comment on the fact that I was getting your nightshirt disgustingly soggy. Sniffing a little, not very discreetly, I asked, “Do you have one?”
“There’s a box under my bed,” you replied. “Hang on, beloved, I’ll get it.”
I shifted off of you enough for you to turn over and reach for it, trying to smear away the worst of my tears as I did so. They’d run down my cheeks to collect in the space between my neck and my jaw, and it was a surprisingly awful sensation. Having retrieved the box, you sat back up and offered them to me, shifting to sit close even as I blew my runny nose, in spite of all the gross sounds that entailed. It took a few tissues to be able to mostly breathe again, and another one to wipe over the remaining wetness on my face and neck. You didn’t flinch from my side, which was honestly impressive.
“I should go get rid of these,” I murmured disappointedly as you took the box back from me.
“Don’t bother. Just put them on the floor.”
“That’s fucking gross!”
You took the used tissues from my hand - even more fucking gross, you nasty little freak - and tossed them somewhere to the side of the bed.
“We’ll deal with them in the morning,” you said, and I really didn’t have the energy to fight it. Even if I was going to end up scrubbing that carpet tomorrow. “Just stay with me. You’re safe.”
Easily defeated, I lay back down with you, your heartbeat steady in my ear and keeping me grounded. Your body was so warm, like a lightbulb left on for half the day, and softening considerably from those early days of me holding you. It was like you were coming back to life, more than you had been even before everything. I guess there were pros to everything that happened after all.
I failed to stifle a yawn, and your hands remained gentle on me even when you followed suit with your own. You held me close, ensuring that my head hadn’t been jostled from its resting place between your chest and your shoulder.
“Sorry for waking you up,” I murmured.
“I wake you all the time.”
“Yeah, but. I don’t wake you.”
You shifted slightly. “There shouldn’t be an imbalance between us anymore. I want you to come to me like I come to you.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that without getting teary again. I paused for a long moment, then settled on saying, “Well, you don’t sleep very much either way. So I don’t like to wake you.”
“Your excuses are terrible.” You dropped a kiss into my hair, wrapping your arms around me and holding me tight.
“Almost as bad as your sleeping habits.”
You didn’t argue with this, which I took as a victory even before you conceded with, “If you come to me, I will stay in bed as late as you do.”
“Really? We’ll sleep in together? You promise?”
“I promise,” you said reluctantly, and then I really did have a victory on my hands. Practically a miracle. “I don’t want anything to keep you from coming to me.”
You pulled me a little closer, hands sweeping my hair back to kiss my forehead. My second chance at life was allowing me to realise how much I’d missed out on when we were hating each other. Obviously there was the kissing, and the warmth of your body under the covers. Then there was all the stuff that I’d always pretended not to notice like the way your nose wrinkled up when I told a really shit joke, or the way the light caught your face in the kitchen. None of that took as much getting used to as how gentle you were with me; how softly you held me and the things you did and said to soothe me. The cracked surface of you hid a depth of softness I could barely comprehend; I doubted you’d known much of its existence before now, either.
I drifted in that softness for what felt like hours, trying to match my breaths to yours to make sure I was doing them right until my heart finally stopped rattling so insistently. The panic was slow to drain, as it always was, but compared to my typical nights it was practically gone in an instant.
I could tell you were still awake even if it wasn’t for the gentle stroking of your hands against me. I was trying to wait for you to fall asleep, to make sure that you caught up on what I’d taken from you, but the lazy patterns of your fingers lulled me into a trance before you could go yourself. This time, the sweeping entrance of the darkness was not fear or anticipation, but relief.
The room was a deeper shade of gold than usual when I opened my eyes in the morning. The sun was coming in through a gap in the curtains, and the whole space was bathed in a gentle, warm glow. You shifted minutely under the blankets, and my head shifted along with your chest. I’d almost forgotten about falling asleep curled up into you.
It was a strange sensation, waking up entwined with you, curled up in your arms instead of the opposite. That’s not to say it was bad. It just made my heart feel as if it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper.
When I moved my head to look at you, you were already blinking down at me, albeit blearily, like you were just waking up as well. You lifted one hand to rub at your eyes, and the other found its way into my hair again.
“Morning, beloved,” you murmured. The softness in your voice made my throat close up, remembering what had happened last night and what you’d endured at my hand.
You’d stayed, just like you’d promised. Not only that, but you were cradling me tenderly, squinting at me like the sunrise with the tiniest of Harrow smiles. As if I hadn’t startled you from sleep just to sob like a baby all over you. As if I hadn’t been weighing you down and drooling on your crusty nightgown since then. I shifted enough to lift my weight off of you.
“Sorry,” I murmured. “I didn’t want to crush you.”
“You didn’t,” you assured me. Your voice was calm, but there was a wrinkle in your brow. “Your presence is a comfort to me. You know this.”
I hung my head a little, and you took the opportunity to press my temples in your hands and softly kiss my forehead. Defeated, I flopped back down - beside you, carefully - and gazed at you across the pillow. You gazed back at me, only moving to brush a curl of hair away from my eyes.
I’d seen you at your goddamned worst, Nonagesimus. I’d seen you sick and sleep deprived and soaked in your own blood, and I’d seen you cry more times than I could count on top of that. I’d seen you terrified and desperate and decimated. I came back to love you every time, and those days of worst got further and further away. You were glowing in morning sunlight now, highlighting the bright ring of amber around your pupil, your skin soft and well-cared for as the rest of you. You loved me, and we were safe. It shouldn’t have felt like a violation to have cried in front of you. It shouldn’t have felt like taking.
You clearly didn’t know how to handle being on the opposite side of this vulnerability either. You shifted, and finally settled on, “Do you want… to talk about it?”
I rested my head against you at an angle that I didn’t have to meet your eyes. “It’s okay. Wasn’t important anyway.”
“It’s important to me,” you whispered. “Nothing in the universe outdoes your importance to me, Gideon. I love you. Even when you wake me up, even when you cry, even if you don't know how to explain it. It doesn't change."
Obviously, I didn’t know how to deal with a statement like that. "What if I did another soul-switcheroo and ended up inhabiting the body of everyone's favourite lanky boy, Sextus?"
Your face screwed up, minutely. I almost expected you to sigh heavily and drop it, or berate me for trying to deflect. However, you continued to surprise and delight me. "Sextus's physical form - exploded."
"Yeah, okay, but what if it didn't and now I looked like him. Would you still love me?"
You sighed, as if to express how much exasperation I was causing you. Still, you said, "Of course I would, you fool."
"What if I was a worm?"
"Griddle."
"What! Seriously. Would you love me if I was a worm?"
You sighed, more heavily and with less restraint this time. "How would I even know it was you? Worms can't communicate. I would likely assume that you'd disappeared and, on an unrelated note, a worm had found its way into our home."
"Well, I'd be a bright orange worm, duh. With tiny sparkly gold eyes."
"Worms don't have eyes."
"Okay, well I'd still be orange. Maybe I'd even have a little skellie pattern on my back - yes, I know worms don't have bones. Stop dodging the question."
You tipped your head back and looked up to the ceiling, as if you still prayed to the powers that be. Not that they'd ever granted you much reprieve of me.
"If you were a worm, I would pick you up without gloves," you said eventually. This might have been an underwhelming response, if I didn't know how dearly you treasured your garden gloves when it came to dealing with anything outdoors on this strange living planet. Particularly anything that moved. "If you washed onto the pavement in the rain, I'd scoop you up to put you back in the dirt. Perhaps I would cultivate a small garden in a glass bowl or vase, so that you could thrive exactly where I could see you. I would still slip you the leftovers from meals."
I was unexpectedly emotional about that.
"Aw," I said. I was absolutely not choked up about it. "You'd do all that for little worm me? Just a wriggly invertebrate with no awesome muscles or sexy eyes?"
You huffed a breath out your nose, then leaned in to press a kiss to the top of my forehead.
"I walked the depths of hell for you," you murmured. "There is no distance I would not go." You ran your hands through my hair a few times, then added, "There's more to love about you than your looks, you realise."
"I probably wouldn't have my amazing talent at kissing as a worm, either."
You shoved at my shoulder halfheartedly. "I'm not talking about you as a worm, you moron. I'm talking about you. I don't just love your appearance."
"You do think I'm hot though, right?"
You rolled your eyes. "That's not my point." I took that as a pretty epic win. "There is so much about you that I adore. Tell me you know this.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve established that I do not, in fact, know anything.”
You kissed my forehead again, which was kind of undermining the hilarious comedy vibe I was going for. You were looking at me with a strange expression, eyebrows furrowed, chewing on the inside of your lip.
Without thinking about it, I reached out to smooth your mouth out with my thumb. You had a terrible lip biting habit, and I was kind of growing tired of tasting blood when I kissed you.
“You are not stupid,” you whispered fervently, and I sighed a little because yeah, we’d had that conversation before. You were just pelting me with sentimental conversation this morning. How was a poor sleepy girl to cope?
“Look,” I said, “I know I made kind of a scene last night – as much as I’d like to forget that it happened at all – but you really don’t have to do all this. I had a moment, that’s all. I’m okay now.”
“I know,” you murmured, and you weren’t paying attention, too busy zoning in on my face and idly tracing the curve of my mouth. You made it hard for me to pay attention, too. “I know how that feels. But I know you wouldn’t tell me if there was something wrong. I know you wouldn’t tell me you were hurt until it was killing you.”
“That’s not true,” I lied. And then: “I really am fine. I just get nightmares. They don’t even make any sense, anyway.”
Your eyes were still treacherously sad and unconvinced.
“Beloved,” you said. You knew that word was all it ever took to break me.
I sighed heavily. Your hands were still on my face, stroking my hair back and lingering on my forehead. You were always touching me when you had the chance to. “I don’t know what there is to talk about. The nightmares don’t make sense, they just keep coming back. I’m fine when I’m awake, and they attack me when I’m sleeping.”
“How much have you been sleeping?”
You cut off my attempts at arguing about hypocrisy and levelled me with a famous Nonagesimus stare until I sighed again and said “Fiiine, not heaps. But enough. It’s fine.”
You were still looking at me like that. “Now who’s the hypocrite?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not staying up late on purpose or anything! My sleep schedule is fine, just up until the point where I wake up and don’t go back to sleep again.”
“Don’t go back to sleep?” you pressed. “Not that you can’t, just that you don’t?”
“You’re such a fucking narc,” I muttered.
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Well, it does to me and my enormous not-stupid brain, so there. I’m functioning just fine.”
I waited for the counterargument, hungry for it, and instead you simply reached out and opened your arms. I stared at you for a moment before you guided me closer, pulling me back in and holding me properly. I listened to the thump of your heart through your chest, felt the rise and fall of your breathing, and allowed everything else to slow down.
“Has anyone ever taken care of you?” you whispered. Something built up in my throat. “Between Crux and I and the entire Ninth House abusing you, between dying and being puppeted left and right in a war you’d never given enough thought about to fight – has anyone ever handled you gently? Would you let them, if they did?”
The mass in my throat played keep away with my voice for too long. “Don’t talk about that shit,” I said hoarsely.
“What’s the point of waking from a nightmare just to huddle in a dark corner and listen to me breathing peacefully on the other side of the room? I’m here. I’m not just a separate entity who happens to be sharing the same physical space. I’m here with you. Let me be here with you.”
I didn’t bother trying to respond to that. It was too horrible, the things you were saying, and horrible because they were true. I had been avoiding the desperation to have you hold me because – well, maybe you were right. Because no one ever had. I didn’t know how to be held, how to be okay with it.
You stroked my hair again, and I let it happen. Maybe that was all there was to it; just letting it happen, over and over again until it felt okay. Maybe that was the only way to learn all the little gestures that came with love, like hair stroking and careful hugs in the kitchen and gentle hands after a nightmare.
“I slept better with you,” I confessed quietly. Your fingers made spirals on my scalp.
“We shouldn’t sleep apart,” you decided. “This arrangement is ridiculous.”
I smiled into your shoulder. You had gotten all puffed up with anger, like this was something you felt really passionate about and not just a throwaway line the morning after a nightmare to make me feel better. “Been daydreaming about pushing the beds together, doom queen?”
You huffed a little bit. “Well, I didn’t want to be presumptuous – “
“We are literally dating? Your hands have touched my organs. And mine have touched yours, actually, just a little bit.”
“The fact that some lines have been crossed does not automatically mean that others should be made dust.”
“You’re so dramatic and pretentious. Just say you wanna snuggle.”
You made another irritated noise, but your hands reached my shoulders to pull me into you, lifting me halfway back to your chest in spite of my trying not to put too much weight on you.
“So you wouldn’t be opposed?” you asked, the question murmured into my thoroughly ruffled hair.
“I like holding you,” I said. “I just… I don’t want to hurt you, if I have a nightmare. Just because it’s better with you doesn’t mean they’ll go away.”
“I know that,” you said. “We’ve hurt each other before.”
“That doesn’t make it okay. I never want to hurt you again. I wish I could undo it all.”
You tilted my chin up and kissed me. I let myself melt into it, knowing it was an apology from both of us.
“We’d have room, with both of the beds,” you reasoned. “We’d just have to put some padding down the middle part. And then we could have our own sides or meet in the middle.”
“I still can’t help it if I flail out in the middle of the night.”
“Neither of us can help what happens, sometimes.” You kissed my forehead again, high up on my hairline. “I want to be there with you. I want you with me.”
I turned my head to kiss your cheek, and you found my lips again, a sweet shock that I melted into as I always did. We stayed there for a number of moments, with nothing calling us to pull away. When we did break apart, we rested with our foreheads touching, slow breaths turning to hurricanes in the gap between us.
“I love you,” you whispered. “I want you to always be safe.”
“I’ll keep you safe,” I replied. “I’ll keep us both safe.”
You ran your hands through my hair, your eyes bright like the sunrise. You didn’t have to smile for me to feel it.
“Let’s get breakfast,” I suggested, feeling more alive than I ever did in the mornings. “We’ll need some energy before we get to redecorating.”