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Miles likes to watch Alfons sleep. Is that creepy?
That’s creepy, isn’t it? Hell. It’s getting so difficult to tell now—Alfons blurs and scuffs and scratches out the boundary lines that looked so sharply cut just weeks ago.
It’s not really Miles’s fault—Alfons is so utterly at peace when he sleeps, with the tension melted from his shoulders, with his cheek squished up against the pillow. He’s a vision of soft pastels against the white sheets; butter-pale wisps and tangles graze his eyebrows; his lips part just slightly; his even breathing makes a loose thread on the pillowcase flutter, and frequently the ruinous organ commonly known as Miles’s heart joins in.
Every now and again, his breath will quicken, and his brow will furrow like it does near-perpetually when he’s awake—but if Miles lays a very gentle hand along his jaw and strokes through the downy hair at his temple with a fingertip, he calms again.
Miles is trying with all his might not to think about it too much. If he dared to conceptualize how much they both have to lose…
Well, he’d probably stay anyway. It’s too late now; it was too late the first instant Alfons set those spring-sky-blue eyes on him and almost-smiled. It was too late the first time these same slender fingers caught his sleeve; it was too late the first time they reached for him; it was far, far too late the first time they brushed so carefully across his face. Miles wasn’t sure then and isn’t now how much of the hesitation was shyness, and how much was Alfons trying to memorize the perfect warmth of another human being’s skin beneath his fingertips.
It’s too late, because Miles—out of complacency, out of carelessness—forgot that he wrote himself a list of rules for a reason. It’s too late, because he hadn’t needed to shore up the walls in so long that they’d fallen into disrepair, and Alfons slipped right through and clambered over all the rubble and made himself at home. It’s too late, because Miles doesn’t remember how to love with reservations anymore.
What if it lasts this time? It’s theoretically plausible, isn’t it? Stranger things have happened. It might not fail. It might not go sour. It might not shatter under pressure; it might not wither when it’s met with the thousand staring eyes. It might… go on like this. It might stay soft and sweet and quiet.
If only he’d forgotten the dread, too. If only he’d forgotten inevitability.
He should get up. He should get dressed. He should go play at normalcy, whether or not he has any claim to it anymore; he should savor every illusion before it all goes to shit.
Soon, though. Not just yet. For now, he should watch Alfons’s eyelashes tremble just a little with every heartbeat. He should wait in case there are other dreams to soothe away.
He should stay a little longer—just in case.
art by the incredibly talented Phindus, originally posted here