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duvall had taken first watch on the off chance that a long day of walking would put chine to sleep and keep them there.
but the nightmares were unsympathetic, and when chine awoke a few minutes or hours later there stood duvall exactly where they’d left him, back straight and arms limp at his sides like a hung corpse.
he was positioned between camp and the fire and chine was almost surprised by his incompetence until they remembered that he didn’t need his human eyes to adjust to the darkness to keep watch. duvall, asleep, could probably keep a better watch than most seasoned cleavers.
as if to illustrate his idle thought, a moth had been resting on chine’s cheek and he hadn’t noticed until he began to sit up and it shifted, fluttering its wings and grabbing at the hairs of his beard to avoid falling off.
from where chine sat duvall’s loose night shirt did nothing to obscure his silhouette, the firelight bright enough to render it transparent. chine, uninhibited by exhaustion, was distracted by the space between his bare thighs, a knot in their throat forcing them to swallow down the beginnings of concern for his friend and how thin he’d become, how vulnerable he’d left himself by wearing nothing but his nightshirt; the contradictory stirring of desire as they imagined filling that space themself.
focused on his dark silhouette, chine’s eyes began to pick up the firelight coming through duvall himself. and he wasn’t still at all - insects patrolled his body as they did the area surrounding the camp. their sensitive night vision opened duvall up until his skin seemed only slightly denser than his shirt.
insects gathered along his skeleton, tended to his heart as it pumped something like blood - visible if chine focused hard enough, following the path of veins through his limbs, mesmerized by the intricacies of duvall’s hands and all the tiny bones and blood vessels and nerves and …. they hadn’t realized it, but at some point they’d laid down again. they stifled a yawn but allowed their vision to tunnel - the world and all of their troubles falling away until it was just duvall and all of his moving parts. distantly they felt the obligation to wonder if he’d be offended by chine’s intrusive gaze or unsettled by the comfort they took in dissecting him eith firelight, but the moth fluttered its wings again, beating a soft rhythm against their temple, and they remembered that this too was duvall.
they huffed a laugh that a living, human, duvall would never have heard, and as their eyes drift shut they felt the soft touch of a hesitant proboscis uncurling to sample the moisture at the corner of their mouth.
chine’s dreams took the form of lyke’s black dog dripping with a gandyking’s blood - torn into beautiful crystalline shapes that spread to consume the entirety of the room they were in, and chine, too. and although they woke with a start to the sound of shattering glass they wouldn’t have called it a nightmare, because there stood duvall and chine knew with a certainty they had almost forgotten themselves capable of feeling that they were safe.