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Ivy knew she wasn't particularly comfortable to cuddle.
She didn't exactly have those memories organized neatly, but they weren't shy to offer themselves up: how the weight of her head upon limbs left them numb and aching, and how her mechanism's panelling tore clothing and flesh alike when she tried to rest it anywhere else.
It was a novelty, then, to not be the shortest one for a change.
Lyric's head tucked beneath her chin so nicely, all while their legs still had plenty of room to tangle together.
The room had long since grown quiet. On the edge of the mattress, for the bedside table was too far to reach, her book lay forgotten—at least to Lyric.
Ivy knew it clearly, down to the exact sentence she had petered off on, same as she did for every one before it. Being boring architecture layouts for the last planet they had stopped on far, far too long ago, she was certain it was what had Lyric breathing sleepy little puffs of air into her chest, regardless of how much they insisted that it was fine for her to read whatever she didn't already have archived to them—that it was her voice that meant the most to them, really, not the subject matter.
If only. Had she any fiction left, she would have gone for it first.
Chill pricked at her skin as the result of her underworked mechanism barely producing any heat on its own. Lyric was doing their best to make up for that, though—her blankets, less so.
Translations, idle, formatting conversions, and the like, sparked circuitry behind her eyes as her lids proved harder to keep apart by the minute.
The light switch was as out of reach as her bedside, but that had an easy enough fix with a quick message to the Aurora. She didn't mind Ivy's bluntness nearly as much as the rest, and so she didn't bother to try and be polite.
Kindness was an ill-fitting tongue on them all.
Odd then, how she pressed her lips to Lyric's forehead when they lifted it, humming a wordless question to the newfound darkness.
Raising her hand from the crook of their side to cradle their head, she guided it back to its place. They didn't say if that was a sufficient answer or not, just let her position them as she liked.
Melted and trusting: it was a good look on them.
She kissed them plenty, but this? Less than three digits worth of instances had been cataloged, and, more importantly, it was her now, and she rather wanted to keep it. There wasn't much time left before it became her then.
Selflessness, too, fit like shrunken skin.
“Will you stay?”
Her voice didn't lose its sharpness for being hushed. There wasn't a sound in the room, save for the ship's ambient hum. Anything more, and the whisper would have been drowned out.
As it was, Lyric seemed to hardly hear it anyway. Their hand patted a clumsy 'I love you' into her back, perhaps briefly forgetting that she wasn't Jonny and quite liked words.
Not that she needed the reminder that they loved her. Dates and data—helpfully graphed should she ever question it—made that clear.
Even without, confirmation existed in their murmured, “Hm?”
“Until I wake up,” Ivy clarified, “will you not leave me?”
That was the worst part of cuddling her, as she had been told time and time again: the screaming, the writhing, the rivers of sweat that seemed to elude only her.
On a few occasions, she had watched camera footage of her doing each, first out of disbelief that it actually happened, and later out of scientific curiosity.
She wouldn't blame them if they left—she couldn't, probably. They had before, under her permission and over apologetic tears, and they were sure to do so again in the future. None could sleep through her night terrors—not even the dead, as one notable instance of unknowingly restarting Marius' corpse proved—but they certainly took it worse than the rest of the crew.
It was a waste of a decent day, usually, albeit a necessary one, to spend hours assuring them that she wasn't upset over something that wasn't even her upon waking.
Usually. Their presence had a bad habit of bringing out the greed in her, though.
Only a wall, framed by messy shelves of celestial maps and leather-bound favorites, cast in shadows save for a star-speckled porthole's light met her sight. There wasn't much loss in letting her eyelids fall shut.
Lyric's face was already out of view, and, either way, Ivy didn't need to see it to know theirs had opened.
From the tensing of their arm around her—pleasantly pulling her closer rather than pushing her away; from experience in technically-memories, truly-archives; from the way their chest stopped its rise and fall: that truth hung as thick as smoke.
Time stretched, enough to have Ivy close the ticking clock that persisted as her vision cut so that she could pretend she lost track of how long it took for Lyric to sigh—less hidden than they would have liked—and return to shallow breaths.
Sleep stitched gravel into their oft-bright voice. Whispering came more naturally to them, “Do you want that?”
“Is there another reason I would ask?”
It would have been pointless in that case. Even if she held motivations that she did not—had she been half as prone to schemes as they were—it would have still qualified as a want.
And, yes, she did want—wanted many things, all of which ranked beneath Lyric at that moment.
They shifted, wiggling in a way vaguely reminiscent of a worm that wouldn't have been nearly as endearing without the day they had passed together.
Humoring them, she rolled onto her back, ignoring the formation of yet another tear in her pillow and the discomfort of her discarded hair tie finding its way to press into her shoulder. Both were well worth Lyric's approving purr—doubly so for the twitch of their ear against her jaw as they squandered no time in shoving their nose into the curve of her neck.
They hardly qualified as a burden atop her, despite lifetimes spent, with varying degrees of success, trying to hold onto any semblance of weight. That, too, was bliss in its own way—they were distinct, if nothing else, when the rest of the crew seemed intent to make up for any visible bone by way of absurd heights.
Perfectly them.
“Then yeah,” their words were warm against her skin, ”of course.“
It took no effort at all to smile.
“Good,” exhaustion wrapped its flaming limbs around her mind, and met peace rather than a rebuff, “I should like to fall in love with you again.”