BEAR CUBS
Beary Bear was a stoic sort of bear, well worn and much loved, his black eyes watching over the sleepers from his place between the pillows.
On one side of the bed slept Miley Stewart, divulged of her Hannah Montana identity by the embrace of sleep and warm crisp hotel sheets. She slept on her side, an arm curled beneath her pillow and her face still smudged slightly by the make-up of her other persona.
Slumbering soundly on the other side of the bed, her lips twitching in a smile as the memory of the previous evening's events replayed themselves in her dreams, was a girl several years Miley's senior, her pale blonde hair still tied in the remnants of the bunches she had worn earlier.
The fiction of Miss. Montana's identity hadn't been completely revealed to the girl who shared her bed. If Miley had heard it once, she had heard it a thousand times; with great power comes great responsibility. She no longer needed her father to quote the old idiom of those early Spider-Man comics to understand that being Hannah Montana was a full time career choice.
Her lips twitched in a dreamy smile as the landscape of her sleeping mind filled with comic book expressionism, a vague glimpse of someone who might have been Lilly dressed in a black-cat suit trimmed with white fur and the slumbering girl at her side now a famous model, her hair transformed from blonde to red.
She was more than content to live her life as two people, frustrating as that may at times be, just as she was more than content to allow her romances as Hannah Montana to occupy different places in her heart to those she had as Miley Stewart.
And it wasn't as if she intentionally went out picking up girls, she might have argued, had she been awake, she wasn't Jackson after all...not that Jackson really had much luck with girls, but still.
The candy counter girl who slept in the space beside her, her back warm against Miley's own was slightly different however. The way she smiled and the little jokes she made that only she seemed to laugh at reminded Miley of the absent Lily and in that had been the seeds of her downfall.
So it had ended up, with her father snoring in the adjourning room, that they had sneaked back to her room and quietly pulled the bed sheets over their heads, soft giggles escaping their lips as fingers had searched out corresponding places of sensitivity.
Beary Bear had remained a stoic, unblushing observer to all that had transpired, his dull eyes seeing everything that had occurred in the spacious bed before him and, like the best of familiars, he would keep the secret forever.
The scene's second observer however, watching proceedings upon a small black and white television set linked to the hotel's security cameras, couldn't find it in herself to be so subtle.