Warm Nights

Vincent rolled onto his back.

 A flap of the tent was loose, and a bit of night sky peeked through. Charcoal clouds obscured most of the view, but he could still see a few stars twinkling.

His eyes were drooping, but his mind still whirred along. Vincent’s chest tightened as his thoughts started to spiral down a path he’d been trying to avoid all day. In the dead of night, he had nothing to distract himself with after all. 

Nothing to stop thoughts that came flooding in, pounding his skull with questions he didn’t know the answer to, that possibly no one knew the answer to. The fact that he might never know, made the back of his throat clench and burn. He realized, pathetically, it was because he was that close to crying over it. 

Crying was the last thing either of them needed right now.

Taking a steadying breath, Vincent glanced at Sylvester. Sylvester’s back was to him, hair splayed across his pillow. Some of it was almost close enough to tickle Vincent nose. The blanket was tucked up to his chin, rising and falling as he breathed. Not the deep and slow kind of breathing that came with sleep though. It was obvious he was awake, Vincent didn’t know who Sylvester thought he was fooling. 

“Hey Syl, you awake?”

He hummed, then rolled onto his side to face Vincent. “Why’re you awake though?” He asked, voice slurred a bit out of tiredness.

Vincent squinted, “I asked you first.”

“No. You asked me if I was awake, not why I was awake.”

He huffed out what could barely be called a laugh, then looked back at the stars. “I dunno. Just thinking.”

Sylvester left it at that for a moment. Vincent could see him shift to get more comfortable out of the corner of his eye. He tucked his hands close to his chest, one of them cradling the other. 

After a few minutes of listening to crickets and the occasional croaking frog, Vincent threw the question back at him. “Why’re you awake?” he asked, still looking up. 

It wasn’t that odd for him to be awake at this hour, but it was odd for him to be awake and not doing something. Usually he was reading a book or writing something in his notebook. He never really just...laid in bed and did nothing unless something was wrong.

It seemed like Sylvester wasn’t going to answer for a moment. Then, he admitted softly,  “My hands hurt.”

At that, Vincent turned towards him, “Your hands hurt?” Had Sylvester got injured at some point and he hadn’t noticed? “Why? What’d you do to ‘em?”

Sylvester’s lips quirked up for just a second. “Nothing. Just happens sometimes. I think it has something to do with my parasite.” He sighed, brows furrowing as one of his fingers twitched. “It’s more annoying than anything else.”

He heard the undertones loud and clear: Don’t worry about it, Vince.

But it had to be a little more than just annoying if it was keeping him awake.

“What’re you thinking about. I mean,” Sylvester amended, “if you want to talk about it.”

Now it was Vincent’s turn to sigh. “I dunno... Just- how crazy it is that I’m the ancient one. Yeah, I have some memories, so I know it’s real, but… They don’t feel like they’re mine, Y’know?” He huffed, “I don’t really know how to explain it.”

Sylvester digested that for a moment. “So what? It feels like you’re watching a movie or something?”

“Kinda, I guess. It might feel more like me if I atleast looked the same.”

“What do you look like?” Sylvester asked almost instantaneously, interest clearly piqued.

“Well I haven’t seen my face yet because, apparently, there’s no mirrors in my memories. But I’m very not human. For one thing I’m like, super long.”

“Really?” Sylvester raised his brows, letting out a chuckle, “I’m getting a fantastic visual here, Vincent.”

“Shut up.” Vincent found himself smiling, and tried not to chuckle himself as he explained. “Alright so, I’m long, I have a lot of fur, and I got really tall ears.” Vincent sat up a bit, lining his arms up against his head in emphasis.

He could tell Sylvester was having a hard time keeping it together. “Do you have, legs?”

Vincent didn’t know why, but for some reason, how Sylvester asked that, combined with the expression on his face, set both of them off into a fit of laughter. Warm, unapologetically-loud laughter that flooded Vincent’s chest with something light and had him hugging his stomach afterward. Laughter that extinguished all his worrying thoughts, if only for just a moment, and left his pulse fluttering softly under his skin. Laughter that made him feel alive and whole, no matter who or what he was.

As their laughs puttered out into soft chuckling and intermittent wheezing, Vincent found his eyes on Sylvester.

His cheeks were flushed, eyes still crinkled as he smiled. Brown tangled locks obscured parts of his face and fell wildly over his shoulders as they shook with laughter. His tooth gap was just barely visible.

He normally looked so hard. Back straight and muscles taught, standing with his hands behind his back, expression professionally-neutral. His ponytail high and without a single strand misplaced, the ribbon tying it a neat, black bow. His pale blue eyes piercing and calculating as he analyzed everything in front of him. The slight twitch in his brow giving away how fast his mind was working, like a machine reading code. 

It was easy to forget that Sylvester was just a kid, not any older than himself. Actually, younger than himself. 

Rarely though, did Sylvester allow himself to be a kid. He’d beat out all of his soft attributes, shoved them into the farthest reaches of his mind, and hid them behind a cold, metal sheet. But sometimes they still resurfaced. Sylvester saw them as weeds, refusing to be stamped out, but to Vincent, they were clearly something else. They were bright and blooming. Tiny flowers that could lose their petals to the slightest breeze. 

Vincent’s heart pounded. His throat clenched as blood rushed through his veins. He realized with frightening clarity that he would do anything to see those flowers.