Archive of Our Own

The elytra caught the wind and he let it take him, arms spread wide, body cutting through open air like something that had forgotten what gravity felt like.

Below him, the ravine shrank to a crack in the earth, then to nothing, and then the whole landscape opened up—forests, rivers, and whatever else was out there. He felt none of it.

You should've been faster, he cursed to himself. You should've seen it coming.

Abovetrain had died while Slushly finally accepted him as a friend. He was going to respond.

That was the part Slushly kept returning to, the part that had lodged itself like a splinter beneath his thumbnail and refused to work loose. He had simply stopped.

Just like that.

Slushly had killed the people who'd maced Abovetrain. That part had taken less than fifteen minutes, which said something about him he wasn't ready to look at directly.

He'd stood over the last of them and thought: I didn't even know him that long.

And then, more quietly, settling into him like cold water: That's not the part that matters.

The part that mattered was that Abovetrain had been on his list. Had been someone Slushly was supposed to hate—the man who had stood next to him and smiled pleasantly while Slushly was made to kill four people to save Aspen. He'd been a target. A name with a shape attached to it, someone Slushly had sharpened his anger against for days, turning it over and over until it had edges.

And then he'd gotten to him and found someone who had changed.

It was something real. Something that showed up in the way Abovetrain talked about the things he'd done, the way he didn't dress them up or make them smaller, the way he'd met Slushly's eyes and said I know what I did without flinching away from any of it. And against every wall Slushly had carefully constructed, he'd believed him. He'd looked at this person who should have been a target and seen someone who had found their way to a different side of things entirely. And he'd thought—for the first time since everything had come apart—people can change. Even the ones you'd given up on.

He'd gotten comfortable. He'd let himself believe it, and breathe a little, and walk beside someone without overthinking any of it.

And then the mace.

Idiot, he told himself.

That was the pattern, wasn't it. Get close. Let them in. Watch what happened after.

Aspen first. The original wound, the first domino. She'd found him when he was nobody—just some guy who respawned and moved on and didn't particularly care about the shape of the world—and she'd looked at him like he was worth the trouble of caring about, and something in him had cracked open that he hadn't known was sealed. He'd started caring about her. And then, because of her, he'd started caring about everyone else too—all the players who got hurt, all the people who needed saving—and it had felt like becoming an actual person.

He should've stayed nobody.

The lightning in his hands sparked—just the static that lived in his palms from the incident with Recalling that he tried not to think about—and he pressed his fists against his sides, curling his fingers tight against the flickering.

Aspen had betrayed him. That was the simple version. The true version was more complicated and more brutal in different ways: Stormz had leverage on her history, dark things she'd never trusted Slushly enough to share, and she'd made a terrible choice from a corner she couldn't see out of. 

They had a chance to go home together.

Stormz had killed her minutes later.

There had been Nufuli, too.

He didn't let himself think about Nufuli often. The wound was different there—not the hot, engulfing grief of losing Aspen, but something colder and more specifically humiliating. He'd gathered the keys, worked through each step with the earnest focus of someone who thought they were finally doing something right for once.

The keys had opened the City of Life.

Stormz's city. Vanguard's city. The city that had swallowed Aspen whole.

He still remembered the exact moment understanding had arrived—the quality of Nufuli's expression. Like Slushly had been a task to complete and was now completed. Like he'd never been a person in that equation at all.

Just give me the keys, Slushly, his voice echoed.

He'd added Nufuli to the list the second he’d escaped from the City. He'd written the name down carefully, and then sat and stared at it for a long time before he could make himself put the marker down.

He'd killed Stormz himself.

He wasn't going to pretend he hadn't wanted to—he'd wanted to since before Aspen died, since the gameshow, the keys and every piece of wreckage that had Stormz's fingerprints underneath it—but wanting wasn't quite the right word for what it became after Aspen.

The problem—the one he hadn't been able to outrun no matter how fast he moved—was that Aspen had wanted him to be better than that.

She'd said it in a hundred different ways without ever quite saying it plainly. The way she'd looked at him the first time he'd chosen to help her. She'd seen that in him. Believed it was really there. And he'd believed her, because she was the only person whose belief had ever felt like it might be accurate about something.

And then he'd killed Stormz just like that.

The bounty list hadn't been heroism. He'd known that while he was doing it.

He was getting tired.

The elytra needed rockets to stay properly aloft and he'd burned through his last one twenty minutes ago, surviving on wind charges.

His shoulders ached with a deep, grinding persistence that had moved past discomfort into something duller and more permanent. His hands had been cramped in fists for so long that uncurling his fingers felt like a punishment.

Below him, mountains. Close to Spawn, he realised—he'd drifted further in than intended, or more accurately hadn't intended anything at all and his body had simply gone somewhere that wasn't empty wilderness.

He angled down.

The landing was bad. He hit the peak of the tallest mountain and his legs buckled on impact, one knee cracking hard against cold rock, the elytra folding shut against his back with a sound like a long, exhausted exhale. He stayed down for a moment, breathing. Then he stood.

The horizon spread itself out before him.

Spawn glittered below and ahead, its lights beginning to flicker on in the early evening, warm gold against the cooling dark. Beyond it the world went on in every direction—all those lives being lived, all those people going about their business, none of them knowing or caring about him.

His throat tightened.

He'd been holding it back with motion. Weeks of motion, but the mountain didn't care about any of that.

She wanted you to save people.

He knew. He had known the whole time. That was the worst part—not discovering the failure but living alongside it for weeks, dragging it alongside him, telling himself he'd deal with it later, and now later was a cold mountain in the early evening with nothing left to do but stand in it.

The first sound he made surprised him—just a small exhale that caught wrong on the way out, nothing dramatic, nothing he'd have called crying exactly. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. The lightning flickered against his knuckles.

Then the pressure in his chest gave way all at once, and all of a sudden, he was sitting down without having decided to, folding onto the cold rock with his knees pulled up to his chest, wrapping both arms around his own legs and pressing his forehead down into the space between his knees—and he was crying.

Not quietly. Not with any dignity. Ugly and graceless, the sounds pulled out of him in rolling waves before the previous one had finished.

His whole body was shaking. It was shaking, deeply and persistently, his shoulders jerking with it. He pressed himself smaller, tighter, as though he could physically compress the grief into something he could manage.

He cried because all his friends had betrayed him or died, which was every single friend he had ever had, and he cried because the solution he'd arrived at—don't get comfortable, don't let anyone in, stay moving—was not a solution. It was just the grief keeping pace with him instead of falling behind and slowly holding him back.

The shaking got worse. He pressed his forehead harder into his knees and let his tears take him.

He was alone. He was completely and thoroughly alone on this mountain, and he'd built it that way deliberately, stone by stone, and there was nothing here but cold wind and empty rock.

"Slushly."

He didn't move. The wind—his brain manufacturing something out of pure desperation. 

"Slushly."

The hand on his shoulder nearly stopped his heart.

He was on his feet before he'd consciously decided anything—the automatic violence of weeks of making enemies—lightning flaring bright and sharp in both arms, sword already halfway unsheathed—

Wyll.

He stood there with one hand still raised from where he'd placed it on Slushly's shoulder, watching him with an expression that was doing the work of staying composed while Slushly had a sword just barely a whisker away from his throat.

Slushly stared.

His brain, grinding slowly through the grief and adrenaline, arrived at: hallucination. Cold, dehydrated, crying hard enough to see static—his mind was filling in shapes from memory. He looked away. Pressed his palm to his face. Tried to slow his breathing.

"I'm real," Wyll spoke up flatly, with the been-here-before patience of someone who has anticipated exactly this conclusion. "You're not hallucinating. I'm actually standing in front of you, you absolute idiot."

Slushly stared back up at him.

The evening light was catching the very specific geometry of Wyll's face and there was a small scratch on his jaw that Slushly was nearly certain hadn't been there the last time they'd been in the same place.

That was an extremely granular detail for a hallucination to bother with. The hand that had been on his shoulder was still lifted, uncertain where to go next, and Slushly could see the faint seam at Wyll's wrist where sleeve met something else, the reality of what Wyll was—the thing they didn't talk about. He was here. He was actually here.

Something gave way.

He crossed the distance in one and a half steps and pressed his face into Wyll's chest and sobbed.

For a long moment, Wyll went completely, almost comically still—both arms lifted slightly away from his sides. Slushly could feel the subtle shift in Wyll's temperature regulation, that faint and deliberate warmth that wasn't quite human warmth but was close.

Close enough.

Then, with the careful deliberateness of someone consulting an internal guide they haven't needed in a while, one arm came up and settled around Slushly's back. Then the other hand moved to the back of his head, fingers spreading carefully through his hair.

The touch was precise in the way Wyll's touches always were, not stiff exactly, but the arms were firm, didn't waver and that was the only thing that mattered right now.

"Okay," Wyll said, to the space above Slushly's head. A brief pause, his tail twitching in surprise. "Okay. Alright. We're doing this." His hand moved in Slushly's hair. Back and forth, like soothing a cat he’d found randomly in a ditch. "You're alright."

Slushly was not alright. Wyll probably had a fairly accurate read on that. But the words found somewhere to land anyway.

It took a long time.

Wyll didn't move.

The arm around Slushly's back stayed where it was, and the hand in his hair kept its slow, even rhythm, and the warmth of him—that consistent, carefully maintained warmth—didn’t withdraw.

Slushly's fists had locked into the fabric of Wyll's shirt at some point without him noticing, knuckles pressing hard into the material, gripping like there was something to hold onto.

The crying ran its course in waves. Tears stained onto his cheeks, and the wind on the mountain’s peak messed up his hair.

The shaking took longer to stop than the crying did. It went in stages—the worst of it first, the deep, uncontrolled trembling, and then gradually something shallower, and then just the occasional aftershock that Slushly couldn't predict or manage.

Wyll's arm tightened slightly during the worst of it—a small, purposeful increase in pressure, as though to give the shaking something solid to push against—and then eased again when it passed.

Eventually Slushly's breathing went from catastrophic to ragged to merely unsteady. He became aware, in stages, of the details around him: the cold, the darkening sky, the dampness he'd left on Wyll's shirt, the grip of his own fists in the fabric.

He didn't move. He wasn't ready to move.

Wyll didn't ask him to.

"Are you done?" he asked finally, and the tone was not unkind.

"No," Slushly said.

"Okay," Wyll said.

The hand in his hair didn't stop.

Some more time passed. Slushly's grip on the shirt loosened fractionally—not letting go, but his hands going flat instead, pressing against Wyll's chest, feeling the warmth of it.

"Come back with me," Wyll said at last. "To Spawn. My base." A pause. "Somewhere with a roof. And walls. And somewhere to sit that isn't a mountain."

Slushly pulled back just far enough to look at him. His face felt swollen and his eyes were probably awful.

Wyll looked back, and his expression was working hard at neutral and wasn't quite getting there. It was something Wyll didn't usually let settle on his face for long.

Slushly considered arguing, considered pointing out he was fine, considered a lot of things and did none of them.

He nodded. Small and slow.

"Okay," he mumbled.

"Okay," Wyll said back.

He reached out and took Slushly by the wrist—not the hand, the wrist, careful of the fragile lightning that could give possibly both of them a zap—and didn't let go as they started down the mountain.

The descent was slow. The terrain was uneven and Slushly's legs weren't entirely reliable yet, which he would have been more embarrassed about if he'd had spare energy for embarrassment.

Wyll kept his hand around Slushly's wrist, and when the path narrowed or the rock got steep he adjusted his grip automatically—sometimes shifting to Slushly's elbow, once placing his free hand briefly at the small of Slushly's back when he stumbled on a loose stone.

At some point without deciding to, Slushly reached up and wrapped his hand around Wyll's arm instead, trading the grip. Wyll let him. Neither of them remarked on it.

By the time they reached the base of the mountain and the path broadened into something more manageable, Slushly had migrated from holding Wyll's arm to walking close enough against his side that their shoulders were in near-constant contact.

Wyll had adjusted his pace and direction to accommodate this without comment.

The outer edge of Spawn's market district was mostly quiet at this hour, vendors packing up, the foot traffic thinned to the occasional person with somewhere specific to be. Slushly kept his face down. The lightning in his arms had calmed down.

Wyll's base was positioned in the middle of Spawn, his stupid trademark ‘mini Wylls’ all over the place. He opened the door and the warmth of the interior came out to meet them, and Slushly stood in the doorway for a moment and took it in.

Green.

Not a green. Green as a comprehensive philosophy. Green walls, green accents and a rug that had made the commitment to green with its whole chest. Curtains that looked teal in the light but were not fooling anyone, and a lamp in the corner casting everything in a warm, distinctly green quality of light.

Under normal circumstances—any other day, any other version of the last weeks—Slushly would have had many things to say about this.

He didn't have them now. He stood in the doorway looking at the green lamp in the corner and thought, distantly, that it was very Wyll. The same as showing up on a mountain in the dark. Just Wyll, completely and specifically Wyll, and Wyll was here.

"Bed." Wyll instructed, guiding him inside with a hand briefly at his shoulder. "Sit on it. Don't break anything."

"I wasn't going to break anything," Slushly protested. 

"Don't touch my things."

"I'm not— "

"Sit down, Slushly."

Slushly sat on the bed. The hand at his shoulder withdrew and he heard Wyll move toward the kitchen, small purposeful sounds—something poured, something set down, something heating.

The blanket was green.

He pulled it around himself anyway, wrapping it over his shoulders, tucking it against his sides, and curled up against the headboard.

The warmth of the room was beginning to reach him properly now, the deep cold of the mountain starting to loosen its grip. He sat there, trying to think nothing and mostly failed.

The thoughts came slower here. Something about walls. The animal, instinctive relief of enclosure after too long in open air with nowhere to put your back.

I was happy to have a friend again. He'd come to Abovetrain with the intent to kill and found someone who'd looked at everything he'd done and decided, quietly and without announcement, to be different.

He'd believed it. He'd been right to believe it. And Abovetrain had died, and now the proof was gone too, and what Slushly was left with was the knowledge that redemption was real and also that it didn't protect anyone from anything.

He didn't know what to do with that yet.

His thoughts started to drift about Nufuli and  he immediately shut down the thoughts about the leviathan.

Wyll came back with a bowl of soup, steam curling from it, and set it on the bedside table with a small, careful sound.

He looked at Slushly—at the blanket-wrapped huddle of him against the headboard, at the dim flicker of lightning at his arms—and then turned to leave.

"Wait." Slushly called out quietly.

Wyll stopped.

He turned back. He looked at Slushly for a moment and then crossed the room without taking the desk chair, and settled himself on the edge of the bed instead.

The warmth of him immediately tangible, that consistent, regulated temperature, a few degrees warmer than the room.

He didn't say anything. They just sat together in silence.

Slushly reached for the soup. His hands were steadier than they'd been on the mountain. He held the bowl in both palms and let the warmth travel up through his hands. He ate slowly while Wyll sat beside him and didn't ask for anything.

When the soup was about half gone, Wyll commented, without looking at him: "Don't get any on my blanket."

"Your blanket's stupid." Slushly mumbled.

"Hey, it's a good blanket."

"Everything in here is the same colour, Wyll."

"It's a good colour."

"Your curtains."

"What about them."

Slushly stared at him. "They're green."

"Yes."

"You chose that."

"I did."

"You went to wherever curtains come from and you looked at all the curtains and you said, ah yes, the green ones, those are the ones I want for my home— "

"Are you going to finish your soup."

Slushly finished his soup. He was aware, from some very distant vantage point, that something near the corner of his mouth had done something it hadn't done in weeks. He didn't remark on it.

He put the empty bowl back on the table and sat with his hands in his lap, lightning flickering softly, and looked at the green lamp in the corner.

Then he looked at Wyll, sitting at the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees, close enough that Slushly could feel the warmth radiating off him.

Slushly moved. Just a few inches, shifting along the bed toward him, and then stopped.

Wyll glanced sideways, before looking back as if he didn’t notice anything, staying completely silent.

Slushly moved a few more inches. Then a few more. Then he closed the remaining distance entirely, pulling the blanket with him, and pressed himself against Wyll's side.

Wyll's arm came up without fanfare and settled around his shoulders, adjusting its angle until Slushly was more thoroughly tucked against him. Then his hand settled at Slushly's hair, stroking softly.

Slushly went very still. He hadn't expected that. He hadn't expected anything like that specifically.

The stroking kept going. Even and unhurried.

Something loosened in his chest that he hadn't known was still locked, and he leaned just slightly into the hand gently running its course through his hair.

"Wyll." he started.

"Mm."

”You’re a jerk. I hate you, I hate your stupid face and I hate your stupid green furniture.” 

“Oh wow. Okay, yeah thanks.” Wyll huffed, his tail wagging once in (fond) exasperation. 

“I hate everything about you, I want to strangle you so badly—“ Slushly continued, making this motion with his hands, in a choking manner.

“Thank you for your show of love for me and your wonderful comments.” The other deadpanned.

Slushly shifted, tilting further into Wyll's side until his head was properly against Wyll's shoulder. Wyll moved with him, adjusting the arm around his shoulders, and the hand in his hair didn't break its rhythm.

They sat there in silence once again, the only sound was the barely noticeable whirr of Wyll’s systems operating.

"All my friends have betrayed me or died," Slushly finally spoke up softly after five minutes. "That's the whole list."

"Not quite.” Wyll corrected.

Slushly tilted his head enough to look up at him. Wyll looked back with a crooked smirk.

"You are my enemy.” Slushly pointed out.

"Technically."

"We're not friends."

"If you say so.”

Slushly looked at the green curtains for a while.

Then, slowly, he shifted again—turning into Wyll's side completely, the blanket rearranging itself, until he was tucked against him the way you tuck against something when you've run out of alternatives and the alternatives would have all turned out to be worse anyway.

His head went properly against Wyll's shoulder.

Wyll's arm around him rearranged accordingly. It had moved from shoulders to actually around him now—the way the arm on the mountain had been when Slushly had cried into his chest.

"Have you always had green everything?" Slushly asked, wanting to distract himself from his thoughts.

"Most of my life, yes."

"Is it load-bearing. Like, if you got a different coloured object, would something happen to you?"

"Nothing would happen to me."

"But you wouldn't do it."

Wyll considered this with what appeared to be genuine seriousness. "… No. I wouldn't."

"That's the most Wyll thing I've ever heard."

"I'll take that."

"It wasn't a compliment."

"I'll still take it."

Slushly nearly smiled at that.

"Do you have a green toothbrush?" he continued.

A beat of silence. "That's not—“

"Wyll."

"The colour options were limited."

"Oh my god."

"It was the best one available in—“

"Is your soap green."

"It's a natural colour for soap."

"Is your—"

"Go to sleep. It’s late." Wyll cut him off, leaving no room for any sensible person to argue.

Slushly wasn’t sensible tonight.

"No, but why—"

"Close your eyes."

Slushly felt himself smile. A small, exhausted, genuine thing. He felt Wyll exhale in a way that might, if you were being generous, be called a laugh.

He let himself fall into the embrace of sleep.

Sleep came faster than he expected, which was the first mercy.

The second was that the first hour or so was simply dark—no dreams, no sounds, just the deep and total absence of a body that had finally decided it couldn't carry anything for a while and had put it all down.

Then it wasn't dark anymore.

He was in that room.

He knew it was before he saw it—knew it the way you know things in dreams, in the bone rather than the brain. He could hear the silence that had come before, the pause when the world was about to do something irreversible.

He turned.

Aspen was standing across from him. And there was Stormz. And Slushly's body knew what came next even as his mind scrambled to stop it, even as he heard himself start to say something—wait, stop, I'm here, look at me, look at me—and his legs wouldn't move. They simply wouldn't move.

In dreams the worst things always happen at full speed.

He heard the sound of the arrow cannon. He saw her fall. He watched the light go out of her the way a light goes out.

Aspen.

He was running. He got there like how in dreams you always get there, right on the wrong side of too late and he dropped beside her. Her hands were cold already, which wasn't how it had been, the dream was wrong about that part, but it didn't matter because she was looking at him—

I wanted you to be better than this.

And he desperately tried to explain, I know, I know, I'm sorry, I tried, I'm sorry—

And she said: You didn't try hard enough.

He was alone in the clearing with both hands pressed into the floor and the silence of it pouring into him like water into a sealed room, and he couldn't—

He woke up.

He didn't gasp. It wasn't dramatic in the way coming out of nightmares is supposed to be—it was just a sudden and total return, like a switch, dream to room, her face to the warm weight of a blanket around him.

He was in Wyll's base.

He was in Wyll's base. It was dark, the lamp turned down to something low, and Wyll was—

He felt his body gently pressed against the other’s.

Wyll was sitting next to him as they were in the late evening, head tipped to the side against Slushly and eyes closed, the faint sounds of a system in standby barely audible under the room's quiet.

Slushly watched him for a moment. Watched the completely still, very Wyll quality of a resting system, the rise and fall of a simulated breathing pattern that existed purely because Wyll had decided it was part of being functional in the world he occupied.

Then Aspen said you didn't try hard enough, in the back of his mind where the dream was still playing, and his face crumpled entirely.

The first sound he made—a choked, involuntary whimper—was not as quiet as he would have hoped.

Wyll's system came back online in stages: first a faint shift in the sound of him, some internal frequency changing, and then the simulated breathing deepened, and then a slight adjustment in how he was sitting, and then his eyes opened—bleary, processing, working through a boot sequence that took three or four seconds of him groggily blinking before anything resolved in his expression.

He blinked once more. Twice, just for good measure. 

Then his gaze found Slushly, and whatever the boot sequence had left unfinished, that completed it. His eyes cleared. He took in Slushly's face—the already forming red edges of his eyes, the wet tracks on his cheeks, the way his hands shook—and the grogginess simply vacated Wyll's expression, replaced by alertness.

"Hey," Wyll soothed, pulling Slushly closer slightly. His voice had a roughness to it that it hadn't had before, the auditory equivalent of a system that had been down for a few hours and was running its first diagnostics. "Hey. Look at me."

Slushly was already looking at him. His chest was hitching, breath coming in uneven waves, and the dream was still right there, still Aspen saying not hard enough with her hands already cold, and he couldn't push it back far enough.

Slushly pressed himself into Wyll’s arms and sobbed.

He couldn't help it.

The dream was too close, too specific, her voice too exact—you didn't try hard enough, and the terrible part was that his brain had written that, had produced those words from somewhere, which meant some part of him believed them and had been waiting for an unguarded moment to say so.

He pressed his face into Wyll's shoulder and felt the trembling in his own body like a thing happening to him from outside, his hands gripping Wyll's shirt with everything he had.

"It's alright," Wyll murmured. His voice was still slightly rough at the edges. He pressed Slushly closer, both arms firming up. "I have you. You're here. It's alright."

"Aspen—" Slushly tried. Couldn't get past it.

"I know." Wyll's hand moved in his hair, and the other arm stayed solid around his back, and he wasn't going anywhere—that was the thing Slushly could feel clearly—he simply wasn't going anywhere, and the steadiness of it was the only thing Slushly had to orient around. "I know. It's alright. You're here."

The sobbing came in the same waves as before, but different—looser, somehow. On the mountain it had been everything at once, two weeks compacted and finally releasing. This was something more specific.

This was just Aspen.

Just her face, her voice and the particular shape of the grief that didn't have a bottom to it, and his brain replaying the worst version on a loop because that was what brains did when they loved someone and lost them.

Wyll held him through all of it.

He didn't say a lot. A murmur here and there, low and steady, you're alright, I've got you, I'm here—not pretending the dream wasn't real or the grief wasn't legitimate, just providing something parallel to it, a different fact for Slushly's nervous system to receive alongside the terrible ones.

Slushly pressed closer, trembling. His hands fisted in the front of Wyll's shirt the way they had on the mountain, and Wyll made a tiny adjustment to accommodate it—settling Slushly more firmly against him so that the grip had something real to hold.

The warmth of him had come back up, that conscious, deliberate warmth, and Slushly could feel it specifically in the places they were in contact—the arm at his back, the hand in his hair, the shoulder his face was pressed into—like warmth applied where it would do the most good.

The trembling gradually moved from constant to something that came occasionally. The sobs became less regular and then just sniffling.

At some point Slushly became aware that he was utterly, completely exhausted. He was still pressed against Wyll's side, still had a handful of Wyll's shirt in each fist, and the hand in his hair was still going.

"She said I didn't try hard enough," he whispered. His voice came out small.

Wyll was quiet for a moment. His hand didn't stop.

"That was a dream," he said.

"I know."

"It wasn't her."

"I know." A pause. "But my brain wrote it. Which means—"

"Your brain has been running on no sleep and grief for two weeks," Wyll insisted firmly, and his voice had lost the last of the roughness. "It's not an accurate source right now. Don't ask it to be."

Slushly didn't say anything.

"She knew you tried," Wyll said. More quietly. "She knew who you were. That wasn't nothing, even if it didn't go the way either of you wanted."

The silence held for a long moment.

"I miss her," Slushly mumbled.

"Mhm.” 

He didn't try to add anything to that. 

"The blanket's actually pretty soft," Slushly admitted softly after a moment of silence.

A pause.

"I know. That’s why I have it.” Wyll chuckled. “Now go to sleep, idiot.”

Slushly was too tired to protest.

The hand in his hair kept going until it was sure he was asleep, and then slowed, and then stilled.

Wyll sat in the quiet of his base and listened to the sound of someone sleeping beside him, which was, all things considered, not the worst thing to be doing at this hour.

Outside, Spawn breathed softly.

Everything was, for now, quiet.