always and forever is forever young
your shadow on the pavement, the dark side of the sun
Mallos’ eyes flicked over to the desk for a moment, following hers. It wasn’t the first time he had been called destructive, but it still carried the feeling of being mislabelled: like having someone run their hands through his hair the wrong way. He didn’t destroy. He broke things down into smaller segments, clicking the pieces back and forth, understanding them. When he’d made sense of them he put them back together again, sometimes after polishing or oiling the cogs to make them turn more smoothly.

Sperantia would have been the first to laugh at that, pointing out that he wasn’t nearly as adept at putting things back together as he was at taking them apart. Imagining Croe and Sperantia agreeing on something was so unsettling that Mallos had to put it out of his head. It was much easier to imagine the rage-induced flash in his cat’s eye if she’d seen Croe wearing the shirt she’d bought for him.

“I can help with that,” he offered softly, making a mental note to look up what feng shui was later.

Sleep was easy to induce. Once she gave her consent, he traced his arm around her lower back and leant in to kiss her. She went limp in his arms, slipping into a dreamless sleep. Being sure to keep the towel in place, he bundled her up into his arms and carried her through to the bedroom, where the covers had pulled themselves back of their own accord.

It was a credit to his willpower, more than anything else, that he was able to lay with her as she’d wanted for the next hour. He was only inactive when he was asleep, which wouldn’t come no matter how much he willed it. Sleep inducement in others might be easy, but it was hard to apply that magic to himself – especially with every form of darkness pressing in on all sides. Mallos enforced his own stillness by focusing on Croe’s breathing, shallow but gentle, and on the occasional kick from her belly where it touched his hip. After an hour, he couldn’t take it anymore. He slipped out of the bed and paced around the room a few times before retreating back into the living room. The top of the shelving unit – Sperantia’s favourite napping spot while he was at his desk – was still empty.

Mallos ran his fingers through his hair. There was only really one person left he could talk to. He inhaled, focused, and disappeared.

The little lamp on his desk was still burning when he returned, casting the room in a soft amber glow. Even with his breathing a little more regular, the knot in his stomach had only loosened slightly and his mind was no less active. He still couldn’t sleep if he tried. Even so, he pushed open the door to the bedroom, checking Croe was still there. Still asleep.

The pieces of the three contraptions on his desk were in such a mess that he couldn’t have told them apart from one another, let alone been able to put any of them back together. Mallos picked a couple of them up and tossed them on the floor absently, eyeing the acoustic guitar leaning against the wall behind the desk. It probably wasn’t a good idea to test how good his sleeping spells were when performed under stress. He pulled a couple of his drawers open and shut distractedly, pausing over the one which contained a sketchpad and charcoal pencils. He retrieved them and retreated back to the sofa, propping the pad up against his knee.

Art was a distraction, even when he didn’t have to think about what he was drawing. He focused instead on the technicality of it – proportioning, blending, erasing and trying again. The first sketch, to his dismay, could have been plucked from an animal-hater’s nightmare. He’d absent-mindedly drawn a cat’s face, lips curled back in a terrible snarl, eyes blazing. Without hesitation, Mallos ripped the page out, crumpled it up and tossed it across the room.

What else, what else? He liked to draw people, but none of the people he knew would have left their disapproving expressions behind when they were transferred to paper. If he drew a place, it might be a place he never saw again. He doodled a few abstract shapes in the corner of the page before settling on an old favourite. Something neutral. A water-bird taking off, a moment of motion captured in a still.

Mallos wasn’t aware of the moment when he fell asleep. Dawn found him slumped back, the half-finished sketch teetering on his knee, the pencil slipped to the floor. Sunrise cast a gentle, pinkish glow over the heron’s serene, somewhat cartoonish face. Its wings spread elegantly across the page, the feather detail not yet filled in, looking as though it wanted to burst free of the paper.

i can feel you in the silence saying, “let forever be,
love, and only love, will set you free.”