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There was no clock to mark the passage of time in his room, but he was sure if there was one, it’d be deafening right now.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Sleep did not come easily. Even though his room was forcibly darkened, and the hallway was gracefully silent, Jax found himself staring at the inside of his eyelids for what had to be hours without rest.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
He groaned, turning in his bed and plopping his head back down on the pillows, hoping the force of impact might expel the auditory hallucination if just to let silence creep back into his awareness.
Silence would only give way to more racing thoughts; regrets and worries trickling in like rain on a leaky roof.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
He knew what was bothering him. It was more than a simple filling of space in one of his senses. He could feel the way it gripped the animal in his chest, constricting it as it writhed under its grasp until it could only beg to scream.
He settled for a frustrated hum instead, squeezing his eyes shut and curling up into himself to try to shut it out. But it was already inside of him. It was fruitless.
Drip. Tick. Drip-
“Ugh!” he groaned and kicked his blankets off of himself, feeling a rush of cool air as the fur on his chest was exposed. The cool air should have helped him relax, but it offered no such comfort tonight.
He shuddered as he sat up, very viscerally aware of just how much cool air was surrounding him. Cool air with little cover.
Cool air without a place to hide from now that he’d wrecked his small cocoon.
He sneered at whatever presence his hackles were raising at. “Fine.” He did not miss the way his ears snapped against his head as he growled out. It didn’t please him, but nothing in this situation was really preferable. It wasn’t worth fighting right now, anyway. He’d allow this indulgence
He pulled on the string of his bedside lamp, the warm light flooding the room and prompting him to squint as his eyes adjusted.
He could see how twisted his blankets were; they littered the floor wrapped around each other. With a huff, he bent over to pick at the corner of one, flicking his wrist to unravel it as he held it up. He tried to ignore the small bits of purple fur he could see floating in the air as he shook it out and instead focused on sorting his fabrics by thickness.
As much as he pushed his dumb instincts to the side, it was a bit relaxing and familiar. The thin blankets would go on the top as a roof, pillows could be used to patch up the walls, thick blankets to be used as insulation and bedding…
It wasn’t quite burrowing or digging; he did find himself defensive when someone asked him to dig in the sand during a treasure hunt. He wasn’t one to crawl through the shelves of books and magazines Caine would generate based on various subjects, but he suspected it had something to do with being nest-adjacent. He called it nesting, anyway. As bestial as it made him feel.
Well, him and one other person.
At the sound of his door opening, his eyes widened and his ears snapped back against his head. He felt a bolt of fear course through him for the second time that day. Instead of looking behind him to see what it was, he flattened himself against the floor (he was on his hands and knees?) and kept his chin flush to the ground. His heart thrummed in his ears as his breath quickened.
The door closed. He couldn’t move. He felt a shudder creeping up his back that he couldn’t shake out, his fur standing on end.
“Oh, shit, sorry!” If it weren’t for the familiarity of the voice, the footsteps approaching him would have had him keeling over from a heart attack.
His body unfroze all at once, the shudder coursing through his veins and ending at Jax’s fingertips. He took a deep breath, picking up a trace of Pomni’s familiar scent as she got on her knees beside him.
“I-I didn’t mean to freak you out, I was just having trouble sleeping, so I, um, sorry for not knocking-”
The rest of his breath left him in an amused exhale, something akin to a laugh getting yanked out of him. He opened his eyes and looked at her with a smirk. “Hey, I don’t knock when I visit you. It’s only fair.”
She did look troubled in a way that more than simply triggering his prey response would have caused. She looked pretty tired, the black around her eyes more pronounced than usual. She wiped at her face with the back of her hand, the corners of her lips tugging at her cheeks. She met his gaze with a slight pout.
“It’s still not nice to make you feel like that…”
“Eh, it’s not you, it’s…” he looked back at the work in front of him. His blankets looked to be a mess, but they were actually organized to help him make the nest best. His ear twitched as he tried to find the words.
Then he remembered he didn’t really need to. She knew him too well. “It’s hard to ignore tonight.”
She hummed in understanding, giving a gentle nod as she looked at the mess in front of them. “Do you want me to go get some more for you?”
Jax blinked, trying to assess how far his current pile would get him. “If you want to, but this is fine as is. I don’t need to make it a whole spectacle, I just gotta get it out of my system.” He grabbed a bundle of pillows and stood up, gathering them in his arms as he carried them over to the bed.
He could feel Pomni’s eyes on him. Not that he really minded, but sometimes it did make him acutely aware of the fact that he slept shirtless.
He wondered if she liked what she saw, but then he shook the thought from his mind as another took hold. “What made you stop by, anyway? I’m not doing anything fun.”
Silence lingered as he arranged his pillows in a circle. Then he pressed his fist against his chin and made the circle smaller. He resisted the urge to make it too small.
He looked back over to where Pomni still sat, fidgeting with the corner of a blanket.
“Pom?”
She looked a bit shocked as she looked up at him. “S-sorry. Like I said, I couldn’t sleep…” her voice trailed off as she broke her stare to continue fidgeting.
“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t really answer my question. Toss me the blue one?”
She perked up a bit at that, looking around herself. The pile of blankets almost framed her perfectly.
He liked the look of that, for some reason. He swallowed it back down.
Pomni seemed to loosen up a bit as she kept looking. “Uh, like- navy blue, or the one with the stars…”
“Your favorite one.”
“Oh, here.” She bunched up the thickest blanket and carried it over to the bed. It would have been too heavy to throw, after all. As she handed it off, she continued to hover by the side of the bed. “I don’t think I’ve seen you make one of these.”
Jax laid the blanket across the top of his pillows, bunching up some of the sides to fortify the walls he’d already placed. It was true, this was the first time he was making one of his real-deal honest-to-god nests around someone else. Sure, he’d retreat under a blanket from time to time, and she knew this very well, but that was much quicker than actually making one.
He also hadn’t found the need to make one in months. It was easy enough to distract from, but not tonight.
“Yeah, it’s… hard.” He stamped down the crater he’d created. “The black, thin one is the top, but could you toss me another one?”
She reached down for a purple blanket and rolled it up before tossing it towards him. He had to duck to the side, but he caught it before it hit the floor once more.
“Nice catch,” Pomni readied another blanket as he lined the bed.
“You still haven’t answered my question, Pom.”
She tossed the next blanket and averted her gaze. The slight bounce in her step seemed gone as soon as he’d asked.
Her frown always tasted bitter. Like that nasty coffee she drank in the mornings. As much as he’d tried to deny it, his sweet tooth extended to Pomni’s smile. Coffee tasted like regret.
“Sorry, I don’t want to press-”
“I wish you were there.”
He paused. She slowly gathered the next blanket.
“I don’t know if you would have prevented it, per se, but I like to think you might have been more calm. Or maybe you would have stopped it, or-or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you were the only one who wasn’t there.”
As she extended her reach, he bent down to take the fabric from her. With her arms empty, she drew her hands to her chest. “Everyone was freaking out and I-I was so scared, and I know it isn’t my first time or anything, but it always feels so real and it doesn’t help when everyone else is running around and screaming and stuff…”
He didn’t mention that she’d passed him the blanket he wanted to use last. He started affixing it to the walls using the hooks he’d screwed in years ago. “I’d’ve probably said something unhelpful, though. Like, ‘well, it could be worse’-”
“That would have been fine! That would have been silly, or comforting, or something. Because I know it’s not permanent, but it still hurts so much, you know? And it’s hard to remember that it’s not real when everyone is treating it like it is-” She hugged her arms as she sat back down on the floor. “And-and I couldn’t sleep because I’d look into the corner of the room and I feel like I kept seeing that guy there, and I know he’s not real, but still, it just…”
Jax grabbed a few blankets he’d intended to continue to line the inside with, and settled for draping them over the roof. It looked quite nice, actually. The blankets provided more protection from the outside, and the weird fear he experienced should be quelled by the completely dark and enclosed interior.
When she didn’t continue her thought, he filled the void with his announcement. “Well, I think it’s done.”
She looked up at him, worry still etched into her face. “Uh, now what?”
“Well,” he rubbed at the back of his neck, “now I just, kind of, go in. And then I’m in there.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He hesitated before ducking down and climbing into the nest. Having something “solid” over top of him really did wonders immediately, the darkness feeling like a blanket in and of itself. He never usually had to worry about warmth, but he definitely wouldn’t need to with how he constructed it. He turned himself around as he curled up along the pillows to face Pomni.
“It… looks comfy.” Pomni’s eyes followed the flow of the blankets as she spoke, her head tilting slightly to continue her gaze. Jax stared at the side of her head.
The nest felt empty. He removed his arms from the comfort of cover and held them out towards her.
As he did so, he thought he must look like a child. Like he was asking to be picked up, or something. But for as melancholy as he felt, he wasn’t the one who needed to be lifted up.
Pomni turned her head and looked at his arms with downcast eyes. Her expression tightened before she crawled across the mattress, ducking her head under the canopy and hiding her face in Jax’s shoulder. She slotted easily between his arms, wrapping her limbs around his neck in turn. He closed his hold around her, pressing the rest of her body against him and shifting some blankets to encase her in one movement.
He leaned his head sideways to rest against hers and squeezed her gently. A good portion of his worry slipped away immediately, soothed by the feeling of their chests pressing against each other.
Yeah. Of course it would. He was foolish to think it would have worked without her. It felt like he was denying something.
But there were more pressing matters. Like noticing how her breath seemed a little shaken. Or how cold she seemed as she trembled. And that she was trembling at all.
He nuzzled his cheek against the top of her head. He tried to keep his voice just short of a whisper. “You can cry if you need, Pom.”
Her breathing seemed to still for a moment. He used to worry when it’d happen, or shrink away and think that he’d done something wrong. He knew her better, now.
When she exhaled, it was ragged and tainted by a whimper. He forgoed the nuzzle to adjust his head and chin her slowly in something he’d hoped could be construed as soothing.
He felt his heart constrict as her cries broke through the air, high-pitched and small. For all of his prey instincts, she was the one who seemed like she needed protection, not him.
She would claim the opposite, he knew.
After a moment, he turned onto his side, pulling her closer to him and curling up around her, pulling his knees up behind her back. As he did so, he felt the ill in his gut finally fading. Bone-deep relief was a very soothing balm when he’d spent the entire night on edge.
Her whimpers had stopped, only her sniffles and stray hiccups giving any indication that she was still crying. He swallowed.
“I wish I was there, too.”
She let out a shaky breath and gripped him tighter. She tilted her head to speak, her forehead nuzzling against the fur on his chest. “Or-or, like, after, that would have b-been nice, too…”
She couldn’t see, but he frowned at that anyway. Everyone seemed to dote on her so much right after the adventure ended, he didn’t want to get in the middle of all that. It would have probably helped him to see her safe after, though. From the sound of it, it would have helped her, too.
Excuses were no good right now, so he kept his voice low and allowed himself to be honest. “I was worried about you.”
She sniffled, her voice still marred by her tears. “But it’s not real.”
“This feels real, though.” It was too dark for him to see her, but he kind of wished he was talking directly to her face right now to gauge her reaction. “The way you feel, I mean. I don’t like when you feel like that. I was worried because you… were feeling like that. Or something.”
He felt a slight tickle by his chest as she exhaled. “I get it.”
“And it’s still not, like, nice to be tortured. Even if it’s not real, it’s still torture.”
Despite it all, she snickered. “You’re so eloquent.”
That snicker may as well have been a chorus with the way that his ears reveled in the sound of it. His natural grin tugged at his cheeks as it echoed in his brain. “I’ve been known to dabble in the spoken word.”
“Torture is torture, who knew.” She sounded more amused, now, but her voice was still stained by her upset. Jax bit his tongue, letting another thought slip out.
“Also, uh, you’re safe here. There’s no guy here. We’re hidden and it’s quiet and safe.”
When she didn’t say anything right away, worry started to trickle in again, until she shifted against him and spoke. “...Thanks, Jax.”
Her voice sounded a little sweeter than usual. In the absence of kicking his feet, he settled for squeezing her gently and grinning, instead. “The exit fee is one shirt, by the way.”
He realized as he said it that the joke could be construed as suggestive, and that it was probably good that no one else could hear them right now. But it was just them in the nest, so she giggled.
“But it’s so comfy!”
“You have five others that you’re not wearing, I have none.”
“They all suck! You have a built-in shirt, you don’t even need this one.”
“I’m a man of options, Pompkin. Variety is the spice of life. What if I wanted to wear a shirt to sleep for once?”
“Then I wouldn’t get to see your fluffy chest, and I’d be sad. So let me keep it.”
“I-”
Oh.
“...Yeah, alright, maybe I can waive the fee.”
Pomni placed her head back under his chin, his fur muffling her “yayyy” as she settled back against him.
Sleep might be harder tonight than he thought.