#oc opal

One heartbeat passes, and another. It takes about a dozen more for you to relax even slightly.

He isn’t coming.

Opal doesn’t sleep— he mimes having an evening cuppa and lays down to meditate for six hours exactly to the second. And yet, somehow— he really hadn’t heard you. The page crinkles beneath your fingers again, louder this time.

For the first time in a long time, a smile crosses your face. You slowly, carefully rip the page from the notebook, contemplating how to be rid of it.

You just about jump out of your skin and shove the paper in your mouth at a sudden chime of a clock. But again, the moment passes— it’s just you and the little wooden cuckoo. You take the paper from your mouth, grimacing at the texture… and at the thought that Opal may have actually tried to cut you open to retrieve their work.

The hallway is darker than Opal’s office, void of the faint moonlight afforded by the windows in that room. You shiver, bare feet padding quietly along the carpet. It is only a few steps to the restroom, and yet by the time you’re gently sliding the door closed behind you, you feel as though you’ve run a marathon.

You will your heart to calm once again. All it takes is a flush of the toilet, and part of Opal’s work is lost. Forever, you’d hope, if you could afford such an emotion. But still, something in your chest hums with satisfaction.

Maybe tomorrow night, you’d piss on the diagram before reaching for the handle.

The next night, you find yourself frozen with fear. The faint tick, tock, tick of the clock burrows deep into your brain, fingers locked around the blankets. You had just gotten lucky last night. So incredibly, deeply lucky that Opal hadn’t heard you, nor noticed anything astray today. Your dreams are sparse and colorless, save a few nightmares that Opal doesn’t seem to hear either.

The third night, you find that anger overcomes your fear and exhaustion. Your bones and joints ache so, so terribly— all Opal’s fault. Making you stand in one pose after the next, taking more measurements and notes, heedless of the way your muscles began to shake with strain. The way they’d bathed you after was even worse. A page of immaculate equations is crumpled and thrown away, a pair of Opal’s favorite scissors moved to a different drawer than usual.

The fourth night, your luck runs out. You reach for a quill, and overturn the entire pot of ink. It seeps into the pages below, runs over and drips onto the desk. A tear rolls down your face, then another. You grab the book and pace the hallways, finding one of the few remaining fires to toss it in. You scrub your hands until dawn, but it’s no use.

Opal doesn’t join you for breakfast that morning, or for lunch.

He doesn’t summon you until the late afternoon, the time they prefer to spend in their workshop. They don’t turn to face you, but by now their face is burned into your mind’s eye— their own eyes obscured by goggles, glittering in the firelight of their glass forge.

“You haven’t been sleeping well lately, have you?”

“I’m sorry…”

Opal finally turns, expression inscrutable. They reach out and you flinch, only for them to pat you on the head. “No. I believe it is my own shortsightedness. Clearly I have not been giving you appropriate care and attention.”

A shiver crawls down your spine, lungs feeling tight— “N-no, I— I just— I’m sorry, Opal, it was stupid, I won’t do it again, just—!”

A sting to your shoulder, and the ghost of porcelain lips to your temple. The world tilts on its axis and begins to swim away.

You wake in Opal’s bed, in their arms.

Opal flips a page of the book they’re reading to you. The Odyssey. Their embrace, the iambic pentameter falling leaden from their tongue leave you feeling seasick. For once, Opal registers your discomfort, and readjusts you so that your head lays at a slightly more natural angle. Their cheek presses cold against you, and they begin to read once more.

“This was what she said, and we assented; whereon we could see her working on her great web all day long, but at night she would unpick the stitches again by torchlight.”

Your finger twitches in a mad, violent desire to rip that book from their hands and destroy it before them, to use the spine to bash in that face of theirs— but you find that you can move no more than that. Opal simply closes the book and places it aside, even further out of your reach.

“Perhaps you would prefer I read you something else?”