as kindred should

eighteen

He woke with a sharp inhale, heart slamming against his chest with the force of a battering ram. The dark held him tight, hand around his throat until-

There was the night light. Soft and sweet, shining beneath Pip's crib.

And there was Pip, curled in his arm, head against his chest and fingers in her mouth.

His heart beat fled from his tongue, crawled back down his throat with the hurt of a disgraced alley cat.

It was a wonder that he had not roused the poor girl. He'd woken kicking and screaming before, had given Mel a nasty bone bruise a few times and had left her with something worse when he'd failed to admit the cause. She'd looked at him, brown eyes searching, and she had known, and he had said nothing.

They were stupid fucking dreams. Abstract and melodramatic in every way one could imagine. They belonged in a dime horror novel, in a cheap film made for TV or an old music video. It wasn't that he couldn't admit to them, it was that he wouldn't. He did not want Mel to know what he had dreamt about, that dreams like that could burn him to the wick.

Dorian kissed Pip on the head, and found in the action that his face was wet. A bloody nose, he thought, but it did not taste like iron. Pip squirmed against him, her second hand tugging at the thin, damp fabric of his shirt.

Just sweat, he thought, and he scrubbed his palm against his eyes.

He turned onto his back with Pip held to his chest, and eased himself into a sitting position, then standing. She did not respond with any more than a grunt and a wiggle, her drool-drenched fingers laying limp against his collarbone.

A light on the baby monitor blinked, and when he was certain that she was safe and settled in her crib, Dorian slipped from his bedroom.

A light was on in the kitchen, too, dim and flickering. The light above the stove, he realized, and he scolded himself for neglecting to turn it off. Waste of electricity.

The light burned brighter the closer he came to it, and he realized that it was not the stove light but a thoroughly neglected lamp that sat at the corner of the counter; it had not been turned on in years, but it illuminated most of the room. Long shadows branched from the edge of its reach, and in them he made out a familiar scruffy figure.

"Clara?" He said, voice thick with interrupted sleep. "What are you up for?"

A glance at the clock marked the hour as 2:30, a perfectly reasonable time for an ill sleeper and an entirely unreasonable one for a teenaged girl.

Dorian flicked a switch and muttered an apology at Clara's flinch. When he sat in the chair across from her, she looked up, square jaw rested in the cup of her palm and dark blue eyes rimmed with exhaustion. Nervous tension mounted in his chest.

"What are you up for?" She asked.

"Bad dreams."

Worry flashed over her face, gone as swiftly as it had come. Intrigue replaced it.

"Are you well?"

"Are you?"

She snorted.

"I'm okay. I've just been studyin'. The material, it's... I don't know. It's rather dense at the moment," she said. "And I... couldn't sleep."

"Ah," he breathed. "You're anxious?"

Clara weighed the judgment for a long moment, setting a pen lightly atop a short stack of notebooks before leaning back in her chair. She knitted her brow in silent thought, and finally responded: