i wanted to get this done last sunday, but the Return of The Cyst put a damper on things. i also really want to finish this stupid series before nsfw week THIS YEAR comes around, which is flying in at breakneck speeds already. i’m bad at things.

hello i am marsh of sleep and welcome to the WoW/anime trash fic

Now available on AO3: Quantum Entanglement

previously on Tumblr:

• part one
• part two
• part three

This part has some mild (and mildly uncomfortable) nsfw in the beginning. You’ve been warned. Also warning for the best crackship I’ll ever have and there’s no point in trying to stop me.

Part four_Quiet

Sitting in his computer chair in just his boxers, Soul absently rubs his leg while eying the familiar washed-out selfie of Mom for the third time in as many minutes.

Mother’s Day has arrived.

He’d rather do anything else than drive out of state, take her to dinner, and turn around to drive right back– but Wes is in Argentina this week, and because Dad has no concept of timezones Soul had been subjected to a passive-aggressive text at two in the fucking morning which had simply read, [[ Ahem. ]]

Allows himself to once more test the idea of calling his mother, which immediately returns as a twist of dread deep in the gut. He can’t do it. He does not yet have the endurance.

Soul doesn’t dislike his mother– they can laugh together and have meaningful conversations– but sometimes she simply makes him tired. Mom lives her life in a way that’s completely alien to him, and loving her despite rarely understanding her wears him out.

He’ll take her out to dinner. Eventually. For now, he’ll put off the call despite not having anything better to do.

First instinct is to log into the game, but it’s nine in the morning on the weekend, and dealing with the annoying opposing faction ganking him in the middle of crowded daily quests does not sound appealing.

Shifting attention now to the rest of the internet: Twitter is loud about things while intermittently throwing up ads by 1-800-Flowers for the holiday; Facebook continues to intimidate him via the ever-growing slew of red-painted notifications; Shadow Stag is presently posting tier-9 level instas of shrimp boils on the beach like it’s still fucking spring break; Youtube has diligently piled up his subscriptions enough that the ambition to just pick one to watch can’t be summoned. He sinks in his chair.

This feeling is probably listlessness. Too nothing to feel anything. Pretty pathetic.

With all other procrastination outlets having failed to divert him, Soul stares at the blinking marquee in the web address bar for fifteen seconds before thoughtlessly typing in the first three letters of a porn site and letting the helpful and altogether unsurprised browser history do the rest.

Emotionless gaze falling on a sea of predictable titles and even more predictable skin color. Pressing palm to groin like a warm-up exercise to a required workout routine, he selects something that looks homemade (and, therefore, hopefully less horrifically scripted). Performs a lazy chair dance to push his boxers aside while the video starts.

He can already tell this is going to be a downhill battle. No introduction– just bad lighting and a POV from a guy whose gut is almost blocking the show. Mid-90’s floral print couch, frame rubbing loudly against suburban-textured wall. Partner with faded Mickey Mouse tattoo on shoulder blade: Fantasia wizard version, with the hat and wand.

Soul grimaces. Unexpected childhood icons while trying to get it up is never cool.

Jarring, generic dirty talk overwhelms any otherwise titillating sounds, and he mutes the video while his sensitivities weep for the world. He considers finding a different vid, but feels the risk of future disappointment is not worth the effort; he’s never going to find what he wants, anyhow.

Allows himself to wonder what he does want, as if he doesn’t already know. The answer slips through the cracks between dark curtains he normally keeps pulled shut, mind gradually, grudgingly drifting instead to the impossible universe in which ReaperMan, hands digging into mid-90’s floral, slides around his lap. Reaper looking over her shoulder with sultry lashes. Reaper in makeup? Wigs? Oversized hoodies and Chun Li hair buns? Reaper rapidly switching among all these incongruous variants held together by blazing green eyes, moonshine in his ears.

Now he’s getting somewhere. He presses his lips together, sighing long and languid through the nose.

“You sound bored. Whatcha up to?”

With a hand outstretched to the desk drawer where he keeps the lube, Soul has the realization that his computer is connected to voice chat. He carefully pauses the porn clip, horror manifesting via cold sweat and something close to cardiac arrest.

What he’s doing right now is probably called praying. Praying hard that Reaper (or anyone, for that matter) hadn’t heard anything else loud enough to trigger the microphone. He finds himself suddenly developing a whip-crack hatred for wizard Mickey as he tries to steady his breath.

“Uh. Nothin’. Why?” As if every guilty person in the world hasn’t uttered those exact same words since the dawn of fucking time.

No signs of awkwardness in her voice, thank all fucks. “Friend of mine needs a run through some heroics. Looking for my kamikaze DPS-slash-clutch healer.”

He doesn’t know how he can feel guilty for using her as wank material while simultaneously happy that she considers him hers in any capacity, but he is and his face is steaming. He sucks. “You just want me to suffer another round of heart failure,” he says.

“Gotta keep you on your toes,” she says loftily, audible smile piercing him from miles away, and he thinks he can physically feel the life he used to have prior to crushing on Reaper packing its bags and abandoning him for someone less miserable. He resolutely tucks himself back in his boxers.

Then she says, “Unless I’m interrupting something.”

Soul pauses while adjusting himself. Refuses to panic, refuses to, refu– “Like what?”

An unsure beat of silence that makes him sweatier. “Well, it’s a holiday– “

Oh, yeah. The first phrase that comes to his mind following ‘Mother’s Day’  is ‘procrastinating shitbag,’ but he does his best to ignore it. “Right, I should probably leave after lunch. I’m free til then, though.”

“Cool.”

“Who’re we runnin’, anyway?”

Blackheart is a guildless warlock in bottom-shelf, quest-reward gear, but they play well enough that Soul doesn’t feel the need to babysit– in fact, the ‘lock’s pet is doing enough damage on its own that he feels a little threatened.

Not that he can do anything about it or his very quiet competitive streak. Reaper is determined to grab every single mob simultaneously and he has his hands full trying to keep her alive. He gripes at her in voice chat and Blackheart makes nervous emoticons in-game, but Reaper just laughs and laughs and it sounds maybe just a shade forced but he can’t pinpoint how or why.

While Blackheart is sorting through all the loot drops, Soul privately types, [[ u cool? ]] but he hesitates. Erases it before sending.

He finds his mother at the restaurant, sitting at the bar in a slit skirt number that makes him want to carry black censorship rectangles around just to paste them on her legs.

Soul has a hot mom and it’s tragic. If these early-male-pattern-baldness types offering to order her fancy drinks knew she lived in a house full of terrifying clowns, he’s certain they’d reconsider. Also, she’s married.

She’s giving a winning smile to a man in slacks who has clearly been sitting in them all day, and Soul very purposefully slides between them. “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom,” he says loudly enough for everyone at the bar to hear. “Reserved a table.”

He gets a little snort and a kiss on a cheek before they’re seated in a booth that is thankfully far away from the loud music playing at the bar. After the server gives them their drinks, Soul waves to his mother’s outfit and says, “Surely you didn’t get all fancy just for this.”

Mom wipes stray tortilla chip crumbs off the table. “Do you mean to say I shouldn’t dress up on a day meant for mothers who have raised beautiful children? Because I’d like to think I qualify.”

Soul sinks a little in his side of the booth, wincing when his left knee collides into the beam supporting the table. “Nice try buttering me up, but Wes is the model, not me,” he grumbles while proceeding to throw a rancid glare over his shoulder, staring down the herd of receding hairlines that had offered to buy her drinks for a few gratifying seconds. Turning back around, he adds, “Not to diminish any maternal titles you’ve earned for yourself, but you’re overdressed for a fajita salad, Ma.”

“If I can’t dress nice in public, where can I?” Therese Evans says frankly over her iced tea. “Besides, cheap fake Mexican food is my fave. Don’t pretend like you weren’t excited when I suggested it.”

Even if she’s being evasive, they do serve some killer nachos, here.

“So what do you actually have planned after this,” Soul says on a bored sigh. “I know you’re not wearing Tiffany’s for the mere second son.”

Mom smiles, admiring the rings on her fingers. “You noticed.”

“You raised me to have taste,” he admits, the corner of his lips picking up in a smirk for all of two seconds before falling away. “Don’t dodge the question.”

She gives him one of those life-threatening, Mom-Is-Not-Pleased-With-Your-Smart-Mouth looks that is quick to return Soul to the age of eight when he’d accidentally called Wes a jackass in front of her. Before she can say anything, however, their server arrives to take their orders– fajita salad with extra guac; loaded nachos with jalapenos on the side– all the while heaping buckets of flattery on Therese before leaving again.

At Soul’s nonplussed look, she says, “I spent a lot of money on wrinkle cream for the past thirty years, I’m not about to let it go to waste.” She daintily accordion-folds her straw wrapper between circus-striped acrylic nails. “And I was only being evasive because I know how you get about it. Yes, I am going out to see some friends after this.”

He’s going to develop an eye twitch or an ulcer or something. Because by friends, she means sex friends, and by sex friends, she means Soul will forever regret not keeping a barf bag in his back pocket at all hours of the day.

As he tries to stifle his full body shiver, Soul once again tries to grasp the functionality of his parents’ relationship– if it can even be called that– and can only come up with the phrase ‘Loveless Clown Marriage’. His father is always traveling for Geographic, Mom is always buying shiny things and shacking up with her Friends, and, stomach churning, he accidentally blurts, “Does Dad even know?”

Therese sets the straw wrapper on the table. It springs forward to make a little paper bridge before falling over and absorbing the puddle of condensation from her iced tea. Somewhat surprised, she says, “Of course he knows, honey. Communication is the key to a long-distance relationship.”

“I– mmrgh.” Despite what he feels to be a major point being missed, here, the words ‘long’ and ‘distance’ and ‘relationship’ in that very particular order triggers a series of feelings in his body that can be accurately described as ‘debilitating crush on his main tank’. Admittedly, thinking about Reaper is far more preferable over coming to terms with Dad essentially having a clowntown trophy wife or whatever, and so he sighs, “As long as you’re happy, Mom,” while entertaining ideas of texting Reaper to see if she wants to meet up after this.

“Thank you, I am very happy. Also, you know perfectly well you’re just as handsome as my first born.”

“Oh god–”

“And I really enjoy going to dinner with you. People think I’m a cougar.”

Soul groans. “Don’t ever say that again, and never while looking so pleased about it, Christ.”

She laughs heartily, and when the food arrives, he passes the plastic cup of jalapenos to her patient, outstretched hand. She then spoons over her heap of guacamole to slop it over his nachos.

When he’s steadily approaching minute twenty on a bench in front of the restaurant, debating on whether or not to call ReaperMan because he still has a four hour drive home and he doesn’t want to interrupt if she’s visiting her mom for Mother’s Day, he gets an email notification.

Email notification noise: Warcraft’s orc peon accepting orders, responding with, “Work, work.”

Someone’s posted a new thread on the guild forum in applicant recommendations; he keeps tabs on it to check out promising players and vouch for them if he knows them. Also to make sure he isn’t about to lose his raid spot, but that goes without saying.

Loading the thread on his phone, he’s surprised to see the post is for Blackheart, the warlock from this morning, and rec’d by Reaper just minutes ago.

That’s not only interesting, but handy.

[[ i didnt kno lock wanted in ]] he texts, now that he has a reason to as opposed to chatting out of nowhere, and also knowing she can’t be terribly busy if she’s haunting the forum.

The reply comes in short bursts, because she’s still not used to her new phone and has a habit of hitting send while typing so quickly. [[ Ro’s too shy to app. I think if s ]] [[ Some guildies keep an eye out, they’ll realize h ]] [[ How shitty our raiding lock is. ]]

Soul laughs outright. [[ glad im not only 1 thinking that. ill vouch ]]

[[ Nice, thanks!! ]]

[[ np. they play well even w crap gear ]] and then, typing almost as quickly as she does before he can chicken out of it, [[ wat u up 2? ]]

Nervously sweating now, while waiting for Reaper’s next reply.

[[ Bid war with Bstar at the aucti ]] [[ Auction house. He doesn’t even need what I’m buying! Asshat. ]] Then, a belated, [[ Why? ]]

He mumbles, “Chill out,” to himself, but he doesn’t listen. Startling some people that are exiting the restaurant, Soul takes a breath and releases it in an obnoxious dying-animal wheeze while typing, [[ done visiting mom and still in Vegas. got time 2 kill? ]]

“Say no. Say no say no say no say no say–”

[[ Denny’s? ]]

Soul stares at his phone. Does not break line of sight while melting down so far in the bench that his head hits every wooden slat on the back rest.

[[ cool ]]

It’s nearly an hour before she arrives, and though he’s still stuffed with nachos, he’d ordered coffee just to give himself something to do other than bounce his leg under the table. He concedes this was probably a mistake once she walks in; the sky is tinting orange behind her and his pulse is too fast. In ripped jeans and the usual hoodie, she beelines for his booth with windswept hair: national crisis version, not runway model. She doesn’t so much as slide into the other side of the booth than Tokyo Drifts there.

“I’m late,” she says, mouth pinched.

The leg under the table stops. Soul waves a hand. “N-no, don’t– uh, are you okay?”

Reaper gives him a look he can not even begin to decipher before she digs in her hoodie pocket and procures a magazine that is surprisingly not about gaming or anime. Slaps this on the table and hurriedly flips page after glossy page until she lands on a stinking perfume ad. Violently bends the discarded pages back, the binding squealing in protest.

Soul is already cringing away as she spins the ad around on the table to face him.

“This isn’t you,” she says.

“…No. M’brother.” Wes is making that patented fuck face from Denny’s coffee-stained table while hovering over the shoulder of a woman holding a jeweled perfume bottle. “Who told?”

Reaper shakes her head, uninterested. “Where is he right now?”

Leaning back in his seat, dread drips down Soul’s spine. The leg starts up again. “Wwwhhyyyy??”

“Eater.”

“Fuck, I dunno, Buenos Aires, maybe? He’s on another shoot.” And that’s when ReaperMan, like a felled tree, tilts to one side and crashes into the seat of the booth, hair trailing after her as she disappears under the table-horizon. Soul raises a nervous hand after her but puts it back on the table. “Um?”

Voice muffled under the table, she begins spewing a monotone monologue. “I was walking out the door and Dad was Skyping in the living room with his boyfriend and he was dressed all fancy–”

“No,” he says, mostly to his himself, in an attempt to stop his brain from making logical conclusions.

“–with makeup-people fussing with him and he kinda–”

“No?”

“–looked like you and Dad said he was a model and he’s that one in the magazine doing the duck face.”

Soul desperately looks for escape in the surface of his coffee, but reality is too cruel. “Fucking fuck,” he mutters, “The other day. On my futon.”

Reaper slowly grows back, a mortified mushroom appearing across the table as curiosity forces her to sit upright. “What?” she asks, voice thin.

With a hand over his face, trying to contain previous forest fires and eradicate them from his memory, Soul says, “Your dad flies jets,” no question mark.

After a good twenty seconds of stillness, ReaperMan very calmly flags down the nearest Denny’s employee and asks if they serve anything alcoholic.

“N-no, I’m sorry, we don’t,” the server says, eying Reaper critically before glancing at Soul and not finding his apparent situation any more comforting. Reaper smiles politely and lets them get back to work.

“Yes. He flies jets. I should order an orange juice and pretend there’s vodka in it,” Reaper says, dead-eyed.

He can’t not say it. His desire to share his pain is too much. “Reaper, I’ve seen your dad’s happy trail.”

Whimpering, she crumples and digs her palms into her eyes. “He was the dilf the whole time.”

“We can NOT let the guild find out about this,” Soul wheezes.

Her hands fall away, face scrunched in disgusted extrapolation. “Oh God. There’s no conceivable way they would ever not give us hell about it every waking minute for the rest of our lives.”

“We can faction swap. Change our names, change servers… a nice PvE server with no ganking. Hell, I’d settle for an RP server– I’ll practice my creepy canonically gay smile and everything.”

Though it’s a bit frazzled, Reaper actually laughs. “Are you saying we should run away together?”

If asked, he’d blame the blush on the situation, and not the borderline-suggestive way she said that. Exasperated, he blurts, “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. If Spartoi finds out, I’m following you. I refuse to run with any other tank.”

Reaper tints pink, the color high on cheekbones framing an unguarded smile. Soul’s mouth goes dry and he makes a mental note that flattery gets instant, dangerous results. “Black Star would be heartbroken if you abandoned him.”

He scoffs. “Shit. I see him in real life, that’s more than plenty.”

“Point taken. It’d never work though. They’d always find us,” she sighs, reaching over to steal his coffee. A cursory sip and a moment to analyze his taste preference; an additional moment to decide it’s not offensive before slurping more down. Soul wishes he did not constantly notice things like this and give them thousands of pounds worth of meaning they don’t actually have. “Death’s dad basically owns the game, remember? Ah– I remembered what started this conversation,” she laments, resting the coffee mug back on the table.

“You’re not allowed to be more disturbed than I am, okay,” Soul shoots back, pointing a thumb at himself. Leaning forward, he maliciously stage-whispers, “Carpet matches the curtains.”

“Why would you say that?” she howls, causing the local diners to jump and glare over the interruption. “W-wait. His or Dad’s?”

Soul blinks. “Uh. Technically both, I guess.”

Reaper glances back down at duckface Wes for less than a second before yanking the neck of her hoodie over her head and violently shoving the magazine to the side. Soul laughs at her misfortune, but it ends with a sickened groan because it’s his misfortune, too.  Besides, that may have given her more info about himself by genetic proxy than she’d wanted to know.

She’s whining inside the hoodie when her phone chimes at her. Her bangs static-cling to her face when she re-emerges to check her text messages. He reaches for the self-distracting coffee to regroup and decide what subject to even try talking about that doesn’t involve their immediate family sucking face on his futon god damn it. Then he watches the horror-creases in Reaper’s eyebrows smooth away to a weird, porcelain apathy.

“Somethin’ important come up?” he asks.

She tries to shake off whatever had just hidden the person of less than a minute ago, but it still lingers in the corners of her eyes– doll-faced, like every inch of Mom’s house frozen in the same neutral expression. He doesn’t like it.

“Nah, sorry.” She flashes her phone’s screen in his direction briefly, but not long enough for him to make much sense of it. “I signed up for this thing so I get notified when you can see the Space Station go by. It’s pretty cool, but there’s too many lights in the city to see it well.”

“Huh. It’s going over right now? The ISS.”

Reaper shakes her head a little, looking back at her phone. “Soonish. Like right after the sun is down.”

He wouldn’t normally peg her as a space nerd, but he remembers her desktop photo and the guest room in her house with the blown up Hubble image pasted to the wall. Tilting his head to the side, he unthinkingly asks, “So… wanna go see it?”

The green of her eyes is bright and searing. “Go?”

“Yeah, go. There’s no lights once you’re outta the basin– I drive home that way all the time. Bet you could see anything.”

Mouth picking up in that slow smile he’s already long since memorized, Reaper says, “Y… Yeah! Let’s do it! That sounds really– oh, we better go soon, or we’re gonna miss it.” She makes a mad grab for Wes’s face and shoves the magazine back into her hoodie pocket. “Shall I drive? Or you?”

Soul waves for the check for their shared coffee and realizes a golden opportunity has just fallen into his hands. He gives her a lopsided grin. “Ahh, that depends– how do you feel about motorcycles?”

She was made for them, clearly. She leans into the turns without prompt, and when he guns it on the interstate, she laughs– not that strained thing from this morning, but moonshine meeting the night, the way it ought to be.

When they’re out far enough, she taps his back for him to pull over. “This should be good,” she says, hopping off the bike when he cuts the engine. Her voice hushes, the quiet of the desert taking on the air of a library. Gesturing vaguely northwest, she murmurs, “Should be coming from that way.”

“Dark enough for you?”

“Yeah.” Reaper gives him a sideways glance over her shoulder, watching as he props the motorcycle on the kickstand. “That suits you better than the other car.”

Soul hesitates mid-swing of his leg over the bike. Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing? “Well I should hope so,” he says with a confidence he doesn’t actually have. The approaching night is ice on his burning face. “Better than too lazy for anything but public transportation,” he mutters, dismounting and leaning on the bike’s side.

Fluffing up like a bird inside her hoodie, Reaper snerks and simply says, “Yeah,” without further elaboration. Whatever– he’s somewhere around seventy percent sure that was a compliment of sorts, especially given how she seemed to enjoy herself on the ride here. He gestures next to him and she shuffles over to carefully prop herself, too, but then her phone rings.

Reaper’s caller’s ringtone: the ending to Rocket Man, Elton John repeatedly singing, “And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.” Surprising, because he’s only ever associated horrible dubstep with her, not anything classic.

Her phone is blinding when she whips it out of her hoodie pocket, the magazine falling to the dusty ground. “Fff- sorry, I gotta get this,” she says, bending to pick up the magazine while answering the call. Voice brighter than Vegas on the horizon, she says, “Hi!”

The desert is silent enough that Soul can hear the murmur of a voice on the other line, feminine and strangely delayed. Cheerily, Reaper replies, “I’ll be able to, for once! How did the repairs go?”

Soul catches something about broken tools and heavy suits, but he leans away a little, trying not to listen too closely because being an eavesdropper is lame as hell. Focuses instead on the layers in Reaper’s voice as she repeats a track of interested m-hm’s and oh really’s, her eyes on the sky. This goes on for a time until she nudges him with an elbow before pointing skyward.

Moving on a too eerily-perfect trajectory to be a falling star, a shining dot slowly arcs across the Nevada sky. Like a dewdrop on a spider’s web, it slides smoothly through the stars, lit by the sun that has already fallen past the horizon.

Then Reaper says, “Yep, I see you.”

He stares at her for a moment, whips his head to the sky, then back at her. “What?” he hisses, but she’s deaf to him, pressing the phone close to her face.

“Okay. Say hi to the crew for me. Mm-hm. Love you too. Happy Mother’s Day. Ha-ha, okay. Bye.”

The emptiness of the desert is apparent enough when she ends the call that it’s stifling. His brain gives the order to look away from her to see the International Space Station once more before it slips out of view, but he’s still watching her eyes faithfully tracing that trajectory, her hand returning the phone to her pocket on auto pilot.

She says, “They have to share the phone and her time was up.”

He has nothing intelligent to say to this. “You… Your mom’s an astronaut.”

Reaper nods with a quiet, close-lipped smile. It dawns on him that there had been literally no way on Earth he could’ve interrupted her in the middle of meeting her mom on Mother’s Day.

“She has another five months up there.” Reaper huddles up inside her hoodie once more. Then, so softly it seems like she’s talking more to the night than him, she says, “I’m glad I got to see it this time.”

Alone with his crush and surrounded for miles by unpopulated, dark wasteland, Soul realizes Maka Albarn is the one who hates long distance the most.

He drops her off at her car in the Denny’s parking lot, which is some ridiculous station wagon filled with what he assumes is meticulously organized cosplay supplies.

Unlocking her car door, Reaper asks, “So how long will you be in town this time?”

“Oh. I wasn’t planning on staying.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Don’t think I can stomach the clowns today.”

“But, if you’re not staying here… Eater, it’s late! Isn’t that a long drive?”

He shrugs. “I’ll have some coffee. No big deal.”

Reaper gives him an incredulous look, but her obvious worry seeps through it. He should probably feel sheepish in some way but he’s too sidetracked by her face and remembering what her lip gloss tastes like.

“I don’t like it,” she grumbles. “Why’d you even text me if you had to–”

“I’ll be fiiiine.”

She growls while slowly sitting in the driver’s seat of her car. “I’d offer you my place, but Papa will be–” She stops mid-sentence to scrunch her face up in a pained grimace. “Urgh-”

“Don’t think about it,” Soul says urgently. “I don’t want to think about it.”

Reaper takes a deep breath before reaching for the magazine in her pocket and flinging it into the void of the station wagon like it’s poisonous. “You’re sure you’ll be okay?”

“Yes, tanktress,” he deadpans.

That doesn’t convince her, either, but he does get an eyeroll out of it. “Well… Hop on voice chat when you get there, okay?” she asks, two parts bossy demand and one part fluttering-eyed shyness. “So I know you didn’t die.”

He feels gross from road grit and coffee breath but there hadn’t been a second when he didn’t think about her request during the whole four hour drive back to the apartment, so he wakes his desktop with a nudge of the mouse and checks voice chat.

Her screen name is sequestered in one of the smaller channels. Joining it, he asks, voice low, “You awake over there?”

She isn’t using push to talk, for once. He hears an intake of breath. “Soul?” she says sleepily– not ‘Eater’– and if this is death, at least it will be swift. “You’re home?” A mattress squeaks as she rolls over.

“Fully intact, as promised,” he manages to say.

“M’kay.” She yawns. “Mm. Thanks, by the way. For today.”

Having caught it from her, Soul yawns against his will. “Sure? I didn’t really do anything.”

A little more awake and maybe even with a touch of bashfulness, she replies, “Yeah, you did. Mother’s Day is hard, sometimes? So I’m, um, glad that you were here.”

His heartbeat may have stopped or has simply reached sped up so fast to reach the event horizon, but it hurts either way. “…I was glad too. Go back to sleep. I’m alive.”

The bed creaks again. “Nrgh. ‘Kay. Night night.”

He can’t wipe the smile off his face. “Later.”

Soul remains standing at his computer desk, waiting for her to log off and go to bed. Seconds pass, but her name remains.

Leaves voice chat connected as he goes about his business, taking a quick shower and getting ready for bed. Comes back to the room. Still there. He knows, logically, that she probably just had been too lazy to close her laptop, but seeing her quietly present feels like she’s closer than four hours away.