swankivy

. . .

She curls around him, can't help clinging a little, remembering during the waves of her dreams how long she spent with no one. He's here with her, swaying in the unsteady bed, but she's the sturdiest she's been in millennia, here with the boy who saved her. Sleep, she now knows, can actually be restful, and if they were to tumble from this precarious place, she would take the fall a thousand times before she'd see him bruised.

Everything was calculated, and it manifested with perfection: this is the optimal sleeping hour, and he has eaten two cookies with milk and gotten drowsy, and they are dressed correctly, and it happened right on schedule. He beat her to dreamland, likely owing to practice, but she successfully followed him there. Now they're tucked in tidily, joyfully, and she's having another experience that's new to her. Because of him. It is as designed.

She knows she can be cold, so she offers warmth that is not of herself. She loves that he can trust her, can see her care for him beneath the façade of emotionlessness that she wears to defend herself from when feelings are too much. She thinks, she thinks and sees so much about this boy, and here he is for this sliver of time, real in her lap, needing her knowledge and wisdom. Maybe he doesn't know how much she needs his oblivious cheer and his optimism. . . .

It wasn't planned, the nap, but that's the beauty of it--the feeling, giving in, slamming down, tuckering out. Side by side, they're impulsive creatures . . . she so old but still sometimes a bit childlike, he so young and yearning for more time to be a boy. They both need moments like these, where they take a BREAK from that intensity. She'll be there to go full steam again when he wakes.