#utopian-sims

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Gretta slid herself over to the other side of the mattress, pulling back the comforter and patting her recently vacated place in the bed. The blue daemon slid into bed, laying on his back to stare up at the ceiling, one arm folded across his chest as he gnawed at a hangnail on his other hand.

Gretta cleared her throat. “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

He shook his head a fraction of an inch, but otherwise didn’t move.

She watched him for another moment, but he didn’t look at her, his teeth continuing to worry at cuticles. “Hey,” she said softly, and reached out a hand to lightly touch his shoulder.

He jumped at the touch and turned his head to look at her, but still said nothing, his mouth still occupied with his hangnail.

“Hey,” she said again, softer, and pulled his hand away from his mouth, squeezing it in her own. “If you don’t want to talk, I get it, but I’m here if--”

“I miss her.”

She squeezed his hand tighter, giving him a sympathetic half-smile, willing herself not to cry. “I do, too,” she said, but her voice caught in her throat, and the words came out as little more than a whisper, and she knew there would be no stopping the tears.

She released his hands and opened her arms, and he slid over to her, burying his face into her shoulder as his own shoulders shook with ragged sobs. She held him close as her own quieter tears ran down her crimson cheeks, her fingers combing through his ashen hair, trying not to think that just hours earlier she’d seen her best friend buried in the memory garden across town. “We’re going to be okay,” she said, more for her own benefit than for his. “It’s what she’d want. She would want to know we’re okay. We’re going to be okay.”

She held him close until his ragged sobs finally subsided and his breathing slowed and his shoulders stopped shaking, and soon she was drifting off to sleep, too.

“We’re going to be okay,” she whispered again. “I promised her.”