The Keepers' Evil

Forty-Four: I very much appreciate you standing by me through all of this

Song- Awake my soul: Mumford and Sons

"I very much appreciate you standing by me through all of this."

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

One hundred and five.

One hundred and six if I counted the one that became lost from the rest on the bridge of her nose. It was a little like her, the freckle. A tiny bit too far from the others, but never less beautiful, never less deserving.

There was a time that I had tried to count her freckles when she hadn't meant to fall asleep beside me in the Undercroft, the past day's weight of my manipulation and darkness left behind her and instead replaced with a sleepy paradise of everywhere that I wasn't. It had never felt right, to hold her as she slept when she hadn't meant for me to, so I had always left her and the counting had been discarded somewhere in the twenties.

There was a time were the most soul shattering four words I had ever whispered.

There was a time that I had counted every small flicker, counting into the hundreds and getting lost along the way, unsure if one hundred and six was truly the number, but being okay with the imperfect knowledge. It didn't matter how many grazed her nose and cheeks, the number was of small importance, but the counting, the ability to count, the understanding that she had felt safe enough to fall asleep and cling to me as though I planned to leave, that was perhaps the only importance in my existence.

There was a time was that day, and it mended my soul and laughed my whisper into a smile.

The very tips of my fingers smoothed gently over the surface of her skin, starting on her own fingers, the ones that were tiny compared to mine, the ones that rested gently against my chest, feeling every soft crevice and gentle indent, as they trickled in swirls down to her hands.

I trailed my fingertips over them, a discreetly small smile tugging to my cheeks as I realised how many hands I had seen in my life, yet none had encouraged me to wake up before the sun had risen, before life had faded into them, just to memorise every spiral, but of course hers had.

They drew twists of a delicacy that I had only admired in her, one that was foreign to me, through her skin to her shoulders that slumped the entirety of their weight onto my body as she slept upon me, her head tucked against my chest in a sleepily distant haze. Perhaps nobody else in the world could consider one's dead weight to be something significant, but when I had never seen her without a rigid tension, the sensation was more than just something beautiful.

I traced the ridges of her spine, all the way to the back of her neck, perhaps a little too gently, and she shivered at the touch in her softest state. My palms lapped circles around the span of her back, and the kindest of warmths pressed closer against my own skin. It took all that I had, more strength than I had previously known, not to smother her in as many kisses as she held freckles, not to wake her from the deepest of sleeps for my own selfish need to look into the depths of her eyes again.

But this was okay, perhaps even perfect, to exist within her somnolence. After all, we did have a lifetime of this, I had a forever in her.

There would be a thousand more nights of falling asleep too quickly before having found clothes. There would be a million more times of realising that we had both stayed for the entirety of the night. There would be a hundred more tired kisses and a good handful of strewn bedsheets. It would all happen again, but it would forever feel like the first time, and every night I would find solace in her peace, I vowed to that.