Silent-ish Night

Lian stirred, then started awake as they inhaled a bit of fluff. Sitting up and wheezing a bit, they looked blearily around, momentarily disoriented until Siobhan’s living room came back into focus. They smacked their lips a few times to clear the taste of fuzz from their tongue, realizing that they’d probably gotten a mouthful of Siobhan’s fur with their face pressed against his shoulder when they dozed off.

A glance to the side confirmed that he had paused in whichever book he had been reading in favor of looking at them with a raised eyebrow. “Did you forget how to breathe?”

Lian stuck their tongue out at him, then grinned a bit sheepishly. “I just nodded off. It’s your fault for being so soft.” Awake again (for the moment), they snuggled back up to his side and pulled the blanket draped over them both up to their chin. There was a soft rustling underneath, and Lian lifted it in confusion, only to be met with the sight of Pumpkin, Siobhan’s loafki, making itself comfortable in the space between them.

“Aww, is it pillow fort time?” They cooed to it. Pumpkin rubbed its face against their leg, radiating contentment. Siobhan exhaled through his nose and rolled his eyes, and Lian turned to give him a squeeze.

“Huff and puff all you want, you invited me over and don’t seem to be in any rush to kick me out,” they teased.

“Of course not,” Siobhan muttered. He may have been making a show of concentrating on his book, but he did shift it to one hand so that the other could comb through the fur on top of Lian’s head. They happily relaxed into his touch.

Lian had started out the Cherubmas season with ambitions of throwing a party or two, and they hadn’t given up on the idea, but Siobhan was hardly the same kind of partier that they could be (when they had the time and energy, anyway). Likely sensing that he was going to get hit with an invitation and a bad case of pleading impup eyes from them if he didn’t act first, he had asked them to come over for a quiet night in instead. Obviously, they’d jumped at the invitation. It was hard enough to get him to unwind; when he was the one offering, Lian was going to grab that opportunity with both hands.

Metaphorically. Literally, their hands were occupied with Pumpkin, who was seizing its own opportunity to climb into Lian’s lap and get lots and lots of petting. 

“What are you reading?” They murmured, once they had gotten comfortably settled against Siobhan’s side. They remembered him having a different book before they nodded off, hinting at them being out for longer than it felt like. It was hard to care about falling asleep when they were a guest in someone’s house when they were so cozy, though.

“Answering To The Ocean. It’s a new epic fantasy novel.” It certainly looked epic; Lian was a little surprised that Siobhan was able to hold it with one hand. His arms must have gotten more of a workout than one would think, carrying books around all day.

“Ooh, let me guess. Some small-town buns who dream of adventure come across a injured traveler who tells them about a mysterious prophecy, and then a villain shows up in pursuit of the traveler, and only the protagonists are spared from their hometown’s destruction-”

Siobhan cut them off with a huff, and Lian grinned, knowing that their guess had been close to the mark before he even said anything.

“For your information, it’s an ancient map, not a prophecy.”

“Oh, that changes everything,” they said, nuzzling affectionately into his neck when he let out an annoyed grunt in response.

“I liked it better when you were asleep.”

“Sure ya did. Though, I am incredibly soft and adorable, so it makes sense.”

Siobhan gave them the side-eye, but tellingly, he didn’t argue with their claims. They batted their eyelashes at him and got the blanket pulled up over their face for their troubles. Giggling, they pulled it back down and tucked it around their neck.

“Will you read aloud?” They asked.

“I’ll have to start over from the beginning, or else you won’t understand anything that’s going on,” Siobhan said.

“That’s not a ‘no,’” Lian pointed out. “Come onnn, you’re not very far in.”

Siobhan let out a long-suffering sigh, but he was just putting on a show. He flipped back to the beginning of the book without further argument. Lian smiled, reaching down to pet Pumpkin some more as Siobhan cleared his throat and began to read from the prologue.

“Long ago, on the far side of the Forneous Sea, tucked away in a little chain of islands that had never before been touched by the outside world…”

Lian was asleep again a couple of chapters in, lulled back into rest by the cadence of Siobhan’s voice. He noticed, but he kept reading aloud; he wasn’t about to admit it to their face, but they really were adorable when they slept so soundly.