Summary: One night, one coffee, one sleepwalking girl.
Late-night coffee
Posted: 11/10/2018
Status: Dropped
Sandalphon is a solitary being by nature. He does not waste time on pleasantries nor does he care about making new connections. After all, even when he still had regular social contact, it had only been with one singular person. A person who was not by his side anymore.
(He does not count being a lab rat to merciless scientists as “socializing”.)
That’s why, when he finds himself forced to stay on the Grandcypher to recover after his fight with the monstrosity that was the Avatar, he makes it clear to everyone that he doesn’t want to interact with them unless strictly necessary. They accept his terms but, as it turns out, their definition of “necessary” is a bit different from his.
In the end, that’s what saves him, though.
At this hour, late in the night, the whole Grandcypher is quiet. The opposite would be surprising considering the time, which would be called “unholy” by some. He supposes that, to someone who needs to sleep to survive, this would be true, but while Primal Beasts can feel exhaustion and can sleep to make it better, they don’t actually need to sleep. So Sandalphon doesn’t, and brews himself some coffee instead, using his beans.
(And, anyway, he’d rather feel perpetually tired than have to relive that same scene again, and again, and again…)
Sandalphon doesn’t care much about keeping his guard up, considering everyone is asleep aside from a few nocturnal ones who know to stay clear of him anyway. That’s why he doesn’t feel another presence enter the kitchen until he hears a tired “Sandalphon…?” that he will forever refuse to admit made him jump in his chair.
He turns his head towards the door to see a barely-awake blue-haired girl, clutching her pillow as if she forgot it wasn’t actually glued to her hand.
He greets her. “Girl in Blue”
“Lyria” She corrects.
“ Girl in Blue ,” he continues, ignoring her implied request, she pouts, “what are you doing here at this hour?”
She appears confused for a moment, as if she has no idea what she’s doing here. Was she sleepwalking and then fully woke up when she entered the kitchen?
“Hmm…” she looks at the ceiling as if it holds all the answers she needs, “it smelled good, so I came…”
Ah, of course. Guided by her stomach even in her sleep. He sighs.
“Can I have some?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“Pretty please?”
Really, Sandalphon swears if this crew continues to make him sigh so much he will actually deflate from having sighed all the air in his body.
“Only one sip or you won’t be able to fall back asleep.” He says as he slides his cup to where the young girl is sitting down, right next to him ( Really? Right here? There is room everywhere else on that table and she decides to sit right next to him? ).
She smiles at him. “Are you worried I’ll mess up my sleep schedule?”
He immediately bristles at that.
“No, but if you don’t get your 10 hours of sleep you’ll start complaining about being tired and knowing the Singularities they’ll either stop everything and claim to also be tired or they’ll make me hold you as you treat me like your own personal teddy bear again and stop smiling like that damn it— ”
She definitely doesn’t stop smiling and his face keeps getting hotter and hotter and Sandalphon realizes he’s been had again. He’s been easier to rile up lately and some people have been taking advantage of it.
Well, his anger has also become more for show. Nowadays it is usually frustration and embarrassment at most, rather than the all-encompassing anger he felt towards the world and himself when he had first arrived, the kind that would leave his head boiling and his stomach freezing all at once, and that was gradually rotting him from the inside.
Lyria, loathe as he is to admit, helped a lot with that. She often did it by forcing his hand, sometimes gently, sometimes less so, but in the end he learned to stop bottling everything inside as much.
Gran and Djeeta also helped, in their own ways. Gran by respecting his personal space but still checking in on him regularly, and Djeeta by being her usual chatty self and pushing him out of his comfort zone (but not too much, Gran made sure of that, he knows better than anyone that his twin can sometimes be a bit overbearing without realizing it).
He won’t give them the satisfaction of admitting it aloud, but he is grateful to them.
Lyria lets the cup warm her hands for a while, her pillow sitting on the chair to her other side. If he was in a worse mood, Sandalphon would have told her to hurry up and go back to sleep, but he just got done being cheesy in his head so he instead enjoys the quiet and cozy atmosphere.
When she decides she warmed her hands enough, Lyria brings the cup to her lips, takes a small sip.
And makes a comically amazing grimace.
“How is it?” he asks, knowing very well that, at this very moment, she wishes to drown herself in sugar to get rid of the bitter taste of the black coffee.
“It’s…good” she says, visibly cringing.
He smirks and gets up from the table to get something from the cupboard. He comes back just as quickly with a bar of milk chocolate that he swaps with the cup of coffee.
“Don’t tell Katalina” he says simply as he takes back his cup. She nods enthusiastically while eating her bar of chocolate.
Later, when he goes back to his room after making sure Lyria is back in her own bed (she tried to follow him to his, possibly to use him as a teddy bear again, but he was strict about that: she will sleep in her own bed and that’s final…or at least for now it is, maybe one day, when he is not plagued by nightmares anymore, he may indulge her), he briefly considers sleeping, but ultimately decides against it and takes a book he’d started reading earlier that week. It isn’t really his favorite genre, far from it actually and, in his opinion, some of the characters are infuriatingly badly written. But it passes time, time that he won’t spend reliving the same exact moment for the nth time.