#fablewrites

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It’s late at night.

Still early by your standards, but you’re cuddled up with a Sun plush in your arms and pretending to sleep nonetheless.

Unfortunately for you, the long creature propped up at the end of your bed isn’t buying it.

He blinks once, and then again. A stream of red flickers into your vision momentarily as you realise you forgot to keep your eyes closed, and the jig is up.

Moon huffs, prickly and uncertain, swooping closer to tuck you in more tightly, as though that might help still you whether through magically delivering you to dreamland in a comfy cozy nest of a duvet or simply cutting your life short.

You snort as his fingers brush tentatively past your neck as he’s smoothing the duvet, and he flinches back with a squeaky sound as though he’s just pressed them to a hot stove.

“Moon?” You venture blearily. His eyes narrow, but his hands are clasped as he hears you out.

And you go for it.

“Sing me a lullaby.”

The tiniest rasping wheeze escapes him for a moment, then he clamps his hands over his mouth as though to silence the sound.

“Voice box is broken.” He rattles, and you don’t have the heart to sit back up and ruin the tight burrito he’s wrapped you into over the course of several attempts, but now you’re curious.

And being curious is not conducive to getting a good night’s sleep.

“It doesn’t need to be-“

“Shh!” He hisses, jerking forward suddenly like a Jack-in-the-box someone wound up too tightly.

You shuffle back at that, arms bursting out of the now decidedly spilled bed burrito, and you catch him stiffening up, mouth twitching as you grab blindly for the Sun plush you nearly dropped, failing to tear your eyes from the unwavering flash of red.

The room is every bit as still and silent as Moon seems to want it to be for a few short seconds, but you’re staring each other down now, and the air is still caught in your throat.

“Okay, no lullabies tonight, that’s fine by me.” You blurt out, finding your breath just in time to hear the scrapey sound escape him like a little choked gasp, and look up to see him still frozen in mid motion, his eyes flickering between your face, your body, the foot of the bed, and then to the door.

You reach up towards him just a fraction, but the words aren’t coming.

“Alright, well,” You feel around for a sentence you can string together, landing on another idea. “What if I do the singing?”

He looks at you with an unreadable expression.

Then he slouches back ever so slightly from where he was just poised to grab you, gently taking one of his wrists in the other hand and sitting in an almost …attentive way.

He doesn’t say a word, but offers a raspy squeak of support in your general direction instead.

You’re slightly unnerved for an altogether different reason now.

“Okay, just …” You suck in another breath. “Don’t expect too much.”

And it hits you at this moment how you can’t seem to remember a single lullaby off the top of your head. Reaching through the hazy recesses of your mind, finding one you don’t feel embarrassed to start singing out of the blue feels like an even harder ask, and you feel a new level of sympathy for Moon start to kick in.

How did he do this?

With that in mind, you abruptly settle on a song that embarrassingly came to you as you broke eye contact and the pattern on his clothes became apparent, uncomfortably humming and mumbling the first few words, impressed to find him still watching and waiting for more.

“Hmmhm hmhmm little star …”

He hasn’t stopped leaning forward yet, but the softest whirr escapes him as he picks up the barely audible tune.

“How I wonder what you are …”

Then you start to find your voice, the words soft but at least fully formed and enunciated now, and when you dare to look back at your audience of one again you notice him padding back ever so softly towards the little spot he’s claimed for himself at the foot of the bed, no longer staring you down and poised like a gargoyle but now flattening down the sheets around him as though that was his true reason for returning to his perch.

“Up above the world so high …”

And you hear the faintest, softest, tuneful buzz start to sound from his direction as he does so.

“Like a diamond in the sky …”

It sounds halfway between a tune you don’t think you’ve ever caught the sound of before, and what you’re certain is some sort of purr.

Was Moon purring?

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star …”

You keep going, determined to hear more of the sound before he catches himself. And he spins like a little lost puppy at the end of the bedsheets, circling a couple of times before curling up in a neat lunar lump.

“How I wonder what you are …”

You almost stop then - you’re running out of song, and you’ve never seen him settle down in a spot so quickly, if at all while he’s been watching you. But he’s trying to find the tune himself now, voice cracked and whispery at first. Then he’s humming.

Then he’s purring.

A silky, crackly sound emerges as he softly begins to fill in the blanks.

“When the blazing sun …is gone …”

You hope you don’t slip up on the new words, but Moon doesn’t seem to mind, and you find yourself cozying back down to where you’d once been - duvet not as tightly wrapped around you, but the warmth and the cuddle of the Sun plush still inviting as ever, and the pillow silky soft as you had been hoping for.

“When he …nothing shines upon …”

And you notice at some point that his words are slowing. He’s humming once more. Or perhaps you are.

“Then you show your little light …Twinkle, twinkle, through the night …”

The flicker of red from the foot of the bed dims fractionally, and your eyes begin to close to the sound of soft snuffles and whirring, and a half-dazed tune you both seem to be making up at this point.

The tiniest shimmer of blue light fades on the the duvet as your eyes close, and the Moon purrs:

Hank Voight gets shot one night in an private operation that turned south. It was a bad ordeal, and hank knows it was a bad idea to act it alone. Despite being a hard Sargent and a dirty cop-to some that is. He knew he had a bad feeling when going in alone so when the bullets ripped through his shoulder and his arm, he dragged himself behind the car. His own blood slipping through his shirt and dropping onto the cold Chicago ground. He heard the suspect approaching, the crunching of the snowy frosty ground giving Hank the cue the suspect was on his right, and slowly making his way to Hank.

It isn't until three rounds of gunfire went off. Hank felt sort of faint, until a pair of hands grabbed him, pressing down on the wound, trying to control the bleeding, hank snaps his eyes opening to find the only person he was glad to see.

Prince Crowley lives in a wonderful castle surrounded by people he grew up with his whole life. However there are something he doesn't like. For an example he is to marry and the one he married is to bare a child. However every women he sets out to meet never catches his eyes. Until one day, his golden eyes set on the beautiful Azira Fell, a man who was set to be his Butler. He instantly falls hard for the blond haired, blue eyes man. He will do anything he can in his power to win the heart of the attractive man that suddenly ends up in his life.

Once in a while the Moon is blue. Once in a while the Moon wonders where he still has left to go.

He might sit in the quiet for a little while, humming and clicking and whirring subconsciously where the shadows stand still, where it’s safe, where the light won’t blind and the sound won’t deafen and there’s no such thing as night and day.

Today is one of those days. Staring back at him from the foot of the otherwise perfectly tidy storage block that sits up against the daycare wall is a small, toppled creature with a face that looks like his, except when it doesn’t.

He’d seen himself in that doll for the longest time, thought it a strange reflection staring back at him, its round smiling face a eternal reminder that he was one of them. That, at one point, at the very least, he was meant to be seen. Reaching out into the light, he scoops it up, today more like a distorted funhouse mirror than any sort of thing he recognised, its features even-tempered and welcoming where his own uncanny glance sends children screaming into the night for his counterpart to pick up the pieces. And he never cared, not on any other day, but today he’s more blue than ever. Today he has to wonder why it looks so smug.

And his body ventures out into the dimly lit daycare, crooked and unnerving in every step it takes, and he goes through the motions of a playful little dance he only does these days when he’s about to silence something that’s stirring when it shouldn’t be, as he tucks the hapless doll that shared his face once back into one of the little alcoves where no one will find it. And he sits down on the toy barrel that would scream most days if you upset it in the slightest, and he lets out a sharp little strangled sound like broken glass that could be a laugh or a sob.